A Review of A Review of "What Happened"

Mediumite Jamie Pow has written a review of Hillary Clinton's "What Happened." I began a response, ran long--you know the drill--and I decided to post it as an article:

There’s this idea I often entertain, one that inevitably ends up reinforced by every bit of Clinton apologia I encounter: Show me someone who admires Hillary Clinton and I'll show you someone who doesn't really know anything about Hillary Clinton. The someones in this formulation are obviously ordinary folks who may have some kind thoughts toward her, rather than her personality cult, which doesn’t care a whit about the truth, but I never seem to find anything that suggests to me its wrong.

Your article is just the latest in a very long line of articles that reinforces it, and by addressing it in this way, I’m extending to you the benefit of the doubt on which of those categories of someones into which you fall. Simply put, what you're uncritically repeating here is the same nonsense Clinton and her circle have been programming into her cult all along. You write about Clinton being an introvert. That may be true or, as is more likely the case, it may just be nonsense put out for public consumption as a rationale for her compulsive secretiveness and resistance to public accountability but in either event, it isn't a personality trait of any real importance. The one that matters, the one that is behind this book tour, just as it's been behind her presidential races and everything else she's ever done in politics, is that she’s a narcissistic elitist, one who, in this instance, thought she was entitled to become president.

She’s never taken any real responsibility for anything. Narcissists don't. People who run for president do so because they have certain things they want to do. Clinton ran for president because she wanted to be president. It was all just vanity. The authors of "Shattered" covered what a dilemma this represented for Clinton's team, tasked with trying to come up with a way to sell a candidacy that had no rationale. Clinton really "can't let go of her belief that she would have made a very good president." A narcissist can't.

"'For me, political campaigns have always been something to get through in order to govern, which is the real prize,' she admits."

That’s an extraordinary statement. Even politicians with that level of contempt for the constituents they're supposed to be representing at least pretend they care. This is Clinton, for ever so brief a moment, dropping any pretense. For her, politicking isn't a sincere effort to sell a platform; it's just an obstacle to be overcome in order to rule, which she wants to do because she thinks she's great. You write that "Hillary Clinton can't reinvent herself to the American electorate. She can only re-introduce herself." But, in fact, she's reinvented herself dozens of times over the  years. Last year, Domenico Montanaro wrote a good article at NPR on Clinton's constant "evolution" on the "free trade" pacts backed by her donors. She always says she's against them whenever an election looms then "evolves" into supporting them once in office. Multiply that by every other issue and you have Clinton, a politician who regularly sheds personae the way a snake does its skin, taking on whatever new flesh she thinks will advance her ambitions, always careful to avoid anything bold that may thwart them, and who is utterly contemptuous of those who elect her. In her six-figure speeches to her Wall Street cronies, she casually explained her belief in the virtues of being a two-faced phony, saying politicians need "both a public and a private position" on contentious issues in order to be successful.[1]

You cite an example of this, quoting Clinton: "I'm a progressive, but I'm a progressive who likes to get things done." Clinton, of course, became a political figure on the coattails of her husband, a conservative Southern "New Democrat," the first chairman, in fact, of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC, long despised by progressives and now mercifully extinct, was a corporate-backed project that overtly sought to convince Democrats to abandon progressive values and move to the right. Bill Clinton embraced destructive right-wing priorities on crime, welfare, "free trade," deficit reduction, foreign interventionism and so on, and when it came to these policies, there was never any daylight between he and Hillary. Bill honed Dick Morris's "triangulation" strategy for selling all of this, which involved throwing progressives under the bus in order to portray "both sides" as extremists and position oneself as the sensible center, and both he and Hillary have used this same strategy in every national campaign in which they've participated. Clinton's 2016 Democratic primary persona was Sanders Reduced, a watered-down version of Sanders who insisted she was a progressive and that Sanders was an unrealistic extremist. "I take a backseat to no one," Clinton declared in July 2015,"when you look at my record in standing up and fighting for progressive values." But then on another occasion in September, she confessed to being a "moderate" and a centrist and extolled the virtues of this. Then it was back to playing at being a progressive again; when, at a Democratic debate, she was asked about Sanders' contention that she wasn't progressive enough, she offered that line about being "a progressive who gets things done," then went on a question-dodging, triangulation attack against Sanders aimed at portraying him as an entirely unreasonable purist on this point. Now, after contesting this so viciously, she's back to being a "moderate" again. "I think we operate better when we're kind of between center-right and center-left..." As I've written in the past, Clinton is an unprincipled opportunist whose instincts, in a liberal party, are conservative. All of this jockeying she does is sheer mendacity offered in contempt of the electorate by a pol whose only real cause is herself.

That same mendacity is on display in Clinton's criticism of media coverage of the election, which you cite:

"When it comes to the content of reporting, Trump had the easier time in the run-up to the election. Citing a study from Harvard's Shorenstain Center, public policy discussion constituted 10% of all news coverage before the election. Controversy over Clinton’s emails dominated, and received far more sustained attention than any of Trump's 'scandals'."

There are a raft of problems with this.

--Clinton complaining about the serious shortage of policy coverage beggars belief. Clinton didn't run an issues campaign. This was her game:

"Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran TV ads that had less to do with policy than any other presidential candidate in the past four presidential races, according to a new study published on Monday by the Wesleyan Media Project."

"Clinton’s team spent a whopping $1 billion on the election in all — about twice what Donald Trump’s campaign spent. Clinton spent $72 million on television ads in the final weeks alone.

"But only 25 percent of advertising supporting her campaign went after Trump on policy grounds, the researchers found. By comparison, every other presidential candidate going back to at least 2000 devoted more than 40 percent of his or her advertising to policy-based attacks. None spent nearly as much time going after an opponent’s personality as Clinton's ads did... Beyond overall ad spending, the study also breaks down the content of the attack ads aired on behalf of each candidate... About 90 percent of Clinton's attack ads went after Trump as an individual--compared with just 10 percent that went after his policies, the study found."

This chart puts the matter in its historical context:

Clinton likes to portray herself as some sort of policy wonk. You run with this, writing, "It's easy to get a sense of [Clinton's] frustration with Trump--for his obvious lack of appreciation for any policy detail," but Clinton has never shown any real interest in policy; her stated positions on this-or-that have always been dictated by whatever seemed safe and politically beneficial to her at the moment. She performed quite badly when Sanders forced her to discuss actual issues and in the general, she simply discarded any sustained effort at talking policy. You don't get to ignore policy then complain about press coverage that reflects this.

--The corporate press as a virtual monolith supported Clinton from the day she officially entered the race. Mediumite Andrew Endymion and I just had a good exchange on this point, covering the ugly details. Press hostility to Trump was, likewise, near-universal. It's true, as Clinton now says, that the press boosted Trump throughout the 2016 cycle--he was a freak-show, which means ratings, which translates into insanely disproportionate wall-to-wall coverage, even if most of it is negative. Clinton can hardly complain about this either though, as it was the official policy of her campaign from the beginning to elevate Trump and get the press to do the same (another revelation that came to light via Wikileaks).

--Clinton now complains about the sustained coverage of the email controversy but the only reason that stuck around and kept returning to the news was that Clinton insisted on lying about it at every turn. She would lie, the lie would be exposed and she would offer a new one in place of the old, beginning the cycle again. "[D]o you know what the big deal was about Hillary Clinton's emails?" you write. "It seems to me that it all came down to her being able to keep her single Blackberry, access all her email accounts on it, and not having to carry two phones." It's impossible to believe you've followed any aspect of this story if you've honestly reached that conclusion. Those emails are, by law, public records. Back in 2007, then-Sen. Clinton condemned the Bush administration for its inappropriate use of a server controlled by the Republican National Committee to conduct official government business. Less than two years later, the ever-secretive Clinton who had just been chosen as Secretary of State established a private email server in her own home so she could have exclusive control of her own official correspondence. The mere fact that she established such a set-up is a major scandal. Clinton ignored repeated warnings that her Blackberries were security risks. The server itself was a massive security risk. She never requested approval of it and the responsible officials made it very clear she wouldn't have gotten it if she had. Clinton left the State Department in February 2013 without turning over any of her emails and, in fact, she didn't turn over any until December 2014, after the Benghazi special committee had requested them and State didn't have them. She printed up 30,000 pages of them, deleted the rest, the server was wiped and she began a long string of lies that kept the story in the news throughout the campaign. Endymion:

"No, she did not turn over all work-related emails. Yes, she did send classified information. No, there has never been a Sec State who set up a private server in his or her basement to establish exclusive control over all correspondence. No, Comey didn’t call her 'truthful.' The story wouldn’t die because Clinton wouldn’t let it and nobody else was under any obligation to kill it."

She lied about there being nothing marked "classified" in her emails. When confronted with the fact that some were plainly marked, she claimed she didn't know what those markings meant! And on and on. You can't behave like this then complain that the story you're keeping alive via this behavior is still being covered.

This writer doesn't get very excited about the mishandling of classified material. While there are obvious dangers in it and Clinton's behavior was, in the face of them, really reckless, stupid and probably criminal, this is happening inside a government obsessed with secrecy that routinely overclassifies just about everything. That's more my concern. Clinton set up that server to skirt public records requirements. That alone is enough to damn her in this matter but her own view, reflected in everything you quote from her, is that she never did anything wrong in any of this, just made a stupid decision in setting up that server then was unreasonably victimized by everyone. That's how narcissists are. 

I don't know you but I’ve assumed, for the purposes of this piece, that you're genuinely ignorant of most of what I’ve just described rather than just another Clinton cultist mouthing the programming. I would urge you to delve much more deeply into these matters before writing on them any further. You say you admire Clinton but there simply isn't anything terribly admirable in malignant narcissists. Don't too easily throw your own good name away on one.

--j.

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[1] Those Wall Street speeches were full of damaging information that probably would have sank her primary campaign. and like the two-faced phony that she is, she concealed them from public view, trying to dance around every demand for them with doubletalk until Wikileaks acquired and released partial transcripts of them.