Posted on
September 22, 2015
Dems’ Ex-Machina
Clinton Machine was Bill’s alone
by
Daniel
Clark
Anytime Hillary Clinton runs for office, we can count
on political analysts to ask how her opponents will fare against the Clinton
Machine. In reality, they don’t have
to. There’s a reason it isn’t called the
Rodham Machine. The Clinton Machine was
Bill’s, and his alone.
The Clinton Machine functioned as a synchronized
effort among Bill’s perpetual campaign team, the Democratic Party and the
media. This may sound simple, since they
were in general political agreement to start with, but the system would have broken
down if the messages being transmitted among them were not consistent.
When
Bill realized that he couldn’t avoid having several of his scandals
investigated, he had Attorney General Janet Reno appoint one man to investigate
all of them. With that man, Ken Starr,
embodying the opposition, Bill sent out James Carville to declare “wahw!” on him. The media readily adopted that paradigm, consistently
depicting the conflict as a battle between political opponents. Placing it in that context relieved the
president of his responsibility to cooperate with the duly appointed special
prosecutor, allowing him instead to obstruct and malign him with impunity.
The consistency of the message from the Carville-Begala-Blumenthal chorus made it easy for congressional
Democrats and the liberal media to follow along. Ken Starr was an “out of control” prosecutor,
with an Ahab-like obsession with bringing down the president. Ken Starr was a greedy Big Tobacco lawyer
from whom Bill was heroically protecting The Children. Ken Starr was a voyeur, prying onto the
president’s “personal life.” Ken Starr
was the real pervert!
Reporters camped outside Starr’s house, intimidating
his family, even as their publications feigned concern for Bill’s privacy. When Starr testified truthfully and
dispassionately at the Clinton impeachment hearings, Rep. Barney Frank and
other congressional Democrats treated him like a criminal defendant. In a 20/20
interview, Diane Sawyer called the Starr Report “pornography for Puritans,” and
used contrived polling results to tell the audience that Starr was no better
than Saddam Hussein. That’s an example
of the Clinton Machine, chewing up one of his enemies between its gears.
The machine would have malfunctioned, however, if Bill
had sent mixed messages, as Hillary tends to do. Remember that Bill told literally dozens of
lies in his grand jury testimony, but he didn’t just blurt them out at
random. Instead, he wove together a
pattern of interdependent lies, in a premeditated effort to subvert justice.
Compare
that to Hillary’s series of incongruous explanations about her use of a private
server for government e-mails. She
became entangled in her own contradictory statements almost immediately, saying
that she used her personal account for State Department e-mails “because I
thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and my personal
e-mails instead of two,” only to be reminded that she’d recently stated that
she carries both an iPhone and a BlackBerry.
Nevertheless, Hillary had struck a defiant pose for months, until suddenly
doing an about-face and apologizing, calling the account setup a mistake, and
saying that she “should have done a better job answering questions earlier.”
Hillary’s allies in the Democratic Party and the news
media can’t defend her because they don’t know what her story is supposed to
be. They’re not going to commit
themselves to backing up today’s explanation, knowing that she might disavow it
tomorrow.
If she knew how to run the Clinton Machine, not only
would she present a consistent narrative, but she would also go on the
offensive. Rather than try to defend her
own actions, she would pick out one person who’s demanding answers – let’s call
him “Mr. Vast,” as in the Mr. Big of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy – and make
him the enemy. She would portray herself
as the victim, by having all her spokespeople demand to know why Mr. Vast was
snooping around in her private e-mails.
Congressional Democrats would line up for the Sunday
shows to condemn Mr. Vast, each of them looking for his “have you no decency”
moment. News editors and reporters would
liken Mr. Vast to a peeper. The focus
would no longer be on Hillary’s lawbreaking, but on a superfluous personal
conflict between her and Mr. Vast.
Bill could set this all in motion on her behalf if he
wanted to, but why? He has no interest
in returning to the White House just to be the “first husband,” when his ex-prez gig is much cushier.
Besides, that would mean the two of them would have to live together
again.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press