Why Can’t Hillary Stop Fudging the Truth?
Email-gate is only the latest instance in a 25-year habit of dissembling.
Over the past quarter-century she has all too often offered up pained and partial answers to controversies, too often seeming to hide more than she is willing to reveal, only to find that, again and again, the issue blows up in her face.
.. The pattern is unmistakable, from the Whitewater inquiry (when she resisted disclosing documents about a failed Arkansas land deal) to her 10,000 percent profits in commodity trades (which she explained by saying she’d read The Wall Street Journal) to the Rose Law Firm billing records (which infamously and mysteriously turned up in the White House residence after she’d said they were missing) to the Monica Lewinsky affair and the State Department emails themselves.
.. Moreover, dissembling is not always a bad trait in a president. Some of the greatest, most notably Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who enjoyed playing his aides off against each other by letting each think he’d sided with them on a given issue, have been masters of the art. Even Abraham Lincoln was not immune.
.. And if she wins, it is a reality that would seem to presage a presidency of unusual secretiveness.
.. Bill Clinton was routinely distrusted by a majority of voters during his time in office, but when he ran for reelection in 1996, polls nevertheless showed that as many as 65 percent of voters believed he cared about them—an advantage of some 20 points over his rival Bob Dole.
.. It is quite another for a former attorney general of the United States to say—as Michael Mukasey did at the GOP convention—that Clinton would become “the first president in history to take the constitutional oath of office after already having violated it,” by her handling of the email server and her shifting, inconsistent and ultimately inaccurate explanations of why she did so.
.. She is a literal, linear thinker.
.. Clinton’s resilience—her ability to slog on in the face of the worst possible reverses—is the trait that has helped her get within reach of the biggest prize of her life. The flip side is that her capacity for a level of defensiveness and denial that sometimes seems to border on magical thinking might yet keep the ultimate goal out of her grasp.