Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., probably didn’t feel too much pressure on Wednesday when he was asked about WikiLeaks’ drip-drop release of a top Clinton aide’s most politically embarrassing emails.
“I don’t think they have been damaging at all,” Franken said.
It is difficult to contradict him, if only because Donald Trump continues to draw attention to himself and breathe new life into his own scandals rather than turn everyone’s attention toward his thoroughly compromised opponent.
Clinton’s support cratered in September when the FBI released a report that proved she had lied to investigators and the public, but she’s staged a comeback and nothing in the WikiLeaks dump seems likely to stop her now.
That doesn’t mean, however, that she will skate free of the scandals in which she is submerged up to her ears. Her dishonesty and venality will not vaporize if she wins the election less than a fortnight away.
The emails; her two-faced and handsomely rewarded speeches to bankers; her State Department’s favors for Clinton Foundation donors; all this will live on. So too will the hash of world affairs that she and President Obama have created, especially in Libya but also in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Clinton, who once played dumb to reporters about whether she’d “wiped” emails under subpoena — actually, it was her staff who did it, and not with a cloth but with sophisticated and utterly destructive software — will not be magically cleansed of slime by an election victory any more than she would be defeat.
She may have lucked out in the political opponent she faces, but her scandals may last longer than him. The second Clinton administration, should it begin in January, will be front-loaded with the distrust she earned by placing herself above the law, and by lying to conceal her breaches of public trust.
Even if Trump keeps driving them off the front page for the remaining 12 days of the presidential campaign, the complaints from Bill Clinton’s longtime body-man and even Chelsea Clinton about the Clinton Foundation being an ethical nightmare will not go away any more than will evidence that the Clintons used it to profit personally.
Nor will evidence of her two-faced approach to free trade. Nor her private praise for Wall Street while she demonized it to dupe voters. Nor her tailoring of positions to union interests, which is sure to come up again if she ever tries to move back to the center.
You can blame WikiLeaks and Moscow for the release of information all you like, and that is what the Democrats have picked as their response to the scandals. But blame really lies with the candidate herself, as it always must with those who have so much to hide. Clinton’s administration, if it does begin in January, will be compromised from the outset in a way none of her recent predecessors’ has been. She has no one to blame but herself.
