Hillary Clinton’s lackluster Tuesday press conference has become a hot topic.
I address it over at Townhall, arguing that Mrs. Clinton simply could not have done much better, given that the only plausible explanation for her handling of her State Department emails is devastating.
Peggy Noonan had another explanation for why Mrs. Mrs. Clinton performed so badly. In her Wall Street Journal column (“Hillary Seems Tired, Not Hungry”), Noonan speculates that Mrs. Clinton just doesn’t want to be president as much as she once did now that she has been exposed to the high life among the Democratic high dollar donor caste:
Maybe what happened to her, in part, is the homes of her Manhattan mega-donors. She’s been in the grand townhouses and Park Avenue apartments since 1992. She’d go in and be met and she saw what they had. Beauty. Ease. Fine art of a particular, modern sort, the kind that is ugly, that reminds its owners that just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t understand that life is hard, painful, incoherent. It is protective, cautionary, abstract and costs $20 million a picture.
But what lives they have! Grace and comfort and they don’t have to worry about the press, they don’t have to feel on the run, they don’t have to press the flesh with nobodies.
She’d like those things! But she went into “public service” and had to live on some bum-squat-Egypt Southern governor’s salary.
She wanted what they have. They’re her friends, no more talented than she. But they went to Wall Street and are oozing in dough. She stayed in the lane she was in. And she figures she missed out on the prosperity her husband presided over.
Peggy also has a delicious take on the way the people around Mrs. Clinton are different from the ones in President Obama’s inner circle in 2008. I can’t resist quoting it, even though it is a bit off track to the general theme of this blog (whatever happened to Hillary):
In 2008 Barack Obama had impressive, disciplined people around him—David Axelrod,Robert Gibbs,David Plouffe. I remember thinking at the time that they were something unusual in politics: normal. Hillary has people like David Brock, a right-wing hit man who became a left-wing hit man. Who’s he supposed to do outreach to, the other weirdos?
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, meanwhile, a medical doctor, diagnoses what the public might be experiencing in the wake of the disastrous Tuesday presser: Early Onset Clinton Fatigue.
In reality, Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history. Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay.
It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy. You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.
In a way, Mrs. Clinton’s latest problem stems from something so seeminglhy small: the storing of her emails, for heaven’s sake. But we know that the controversy is really about something very big: at the very outside of her tenure in Foggy Bottom, Mrs. Clinton took unorthodox (to say the east) steps to conceal her record from history (and more immediately from the electorate next year).
Does anybody today, outside Democratic functionaries, really believe now that we now know enough about what happened and what was said in the State Department the evening of Benghazi?