“If Hillary and Bill had just not tried to get so rich from 2009-2015, would she have won?” Tim Carney asked Friday. The answer is “yes,” but that’s only part of the story.
She would have still had the server, which was the real killer, (and the James Comey problem that came along with it), but the server and money stem from something else. That was her decision in 2008 to leave the Senate to serve in President Barack Obama’s cabinet. Had she stayed put and run as a active and serving member of Congress, she would most likely be president now.
True, Hillary had lived in a bubble of privilege since 1976, when her husband former President Bill Clinton won his first important state office. The bubble became bigger and more privileged when she served as first lady. But her appointment as secretary of state brought her to a whole new dimension, with much more insulation from reality and more and greater occasions of sin.
The Senate itself had been a sort of correction to the life she had lived as first lady. She had to meet and engage at moments with voters. She had to live and contend with 99 equals.
At the State Department, she had control of a huge worldwide apparatus, contact with none but the rich and the mighty, and many more occasions for turning influence into cash.
Even from a mega state such as New York, a U.S. Senator has less chance to sell influence than the nation’s first diplomat. By leveraging the connections and sway of an ex-president against those of a wife thought likely to become the next president, it is no wonder that Clinton’s speaking fees rose to close to $500,000, or that contributions poured into the Clinton Foundation. The bulk of their fortune was made.
And while it made sense for a cabinet officer to resign to run for president following one term in office, (freeing her to make many half-hour speeches for $250,000), leaving the Senate to run for president was something that few people did.
Presidents Obama and John F. Kennedy ran and won from the Senate; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and John Kerry ran, lost, and went back to the Senate, having lost none of their status or influence. Hillary had been rich before the Senate, but she became filthy rich after leaving it, and the greed she displayed after leaving all offices helped greatly to tarnish her name.
But this was the least of the ways that leaving the Senate would hurt her. If she had simply stayed put, as one of a hundred, with a normal government email address, the subject of emails would not have come up.
Imagine the campaign if this thing had happened: no stunning surprise in March 2015 when the server was outed, no criminal investigation by the federal government, no visit by Clinton with the attorney general that elevated former FBI Director James Comey; no Comey statement that her guilt was “not proven,” no Comey letter late in October that the case was reopened due to emails discovered on a the laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced estranged husband of one of her aides.
In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen cite the server’s discovery in 2015 as the event that would doom her campaign before it had started, the huge open sore that would never stop bleeding. Clinton’s ascent to the rarefied air of the Cabinet would give her the chance to indulge her worst instinct, her Nixonian bent toward acquisition and secrecy. She took that chance, and did indulge it.
