As a number of top Democrats salivate over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, TIME magazine’s Joe Klein soils the punch bowl with his latest column.
[T]o top it off, there was a New York Times exposé of moral and fiscal slovenliness at the Clinton Foundation–an unfortunate reminder of the way the Clintons too often go about their business, combining great works in the world with shameless world-class fundraising.
All this while former Secretary Clinton was getting her ducks in a row, preparing, no doubt, for another run at the presidency in 2016. And all that as the political book of the summer, Mark Leibovich’s This Town, was providing the rest of the country with a hilarious excoriation of Washington’s incestuous culture of money, media, lobbying and paralysis.
I suspect that this will be a problem for Hillary Clinton going forward, unless she decides to do something about it. The Clintons, Leibovich makes clear, were present at the creation of Washington celebrity culture. Their political consultants became TV stars. Their press aides and pollsters careened through the revolving door to take jobs doing crisis management–and boy, were the Clinton aides experienced at that!–for some of the greatest corporate malefactors. Their fundraisers, like the relentless Terry McAuliffe, set new levels of brazen display. (You may recall the renting of the Lincoln Bedroom.) …
… Much of the political press and almost all the smug Democrats who populate the world that Leibovich describes in This Town have anointed Hillary Clinton as the party’s next nominee and, given the morbid state of the Republican Party, probably the next President. She is certainly the best-qualified politician to run for President in many a moon. But I wonder: At what point does the stench emanating from Washington reach a critical mass of the population? Can a populist reformer, like New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo or Montana’s Brian Schweitzer, run against her, making the Augean-stables argument that it’s time to sandblast the filth from the nation’s capital? A vigorous opponent could argue that the Clintons’ long history of fancy conferences and steroidal speaking fees and flights on private jets, consulting with Democratic Wall Street sorts like Bob Rubin and Summers, has rendered them too precious to represent the people. There is something unearthly about getting paid $700,000 for a speech in Nigeria.
My guess is that Clinton will have to emerge from her comfort zone–the succor provided by her friends and sycophants and favored advisers–and really address the money culture that is rotting our democracy.
