SPARE A THOUGHT FOR HILLARY

It has become fashionable to ascribe a simple answer to the question as to why Donald Trump emerged triumphant. It is Hillary Clinton’s fault. She was tainted, toxic, too complacent, disconnected, the establishment, corrupt and compromised. This narrative in fact dominated the election cycle and allowed the media to create a moral equivalency between her and Trump. This served their needs as it turned the campaign into an exiting horse race which ensured a ratings bonanza. It also provided the rationale for swaths of the Obama coalition constituents to sit on the sidelines. The latter factors coupled with the racist tide that is sweeping the world, deftly articulated by a charismatic unscrupulous populist salesman Donald Trump, were most instrumental in her downfall, not her behavior. Then there was the comprehensive Russian intervention with the Wikileaks daily e mail dump and the aiding the “fake news” people. The final nail in her coffin was the well worn tactic against her the attempt to criminalize her, shamefully aided and abetted by the FBI.The vehicle this time was her computer usage and the Clinton Charitable Foundation.

Hillary was just Hillary, a seasoned politician who had been in the forefront of change in the compromising world of politics for decades. Never one to set the world on fire she has worked diligently at her vocation. The fact that she was enthusiastically backed by Obama and anyone who was anyone on both sides of the aisle, while enunciating the agenda that she did, showed that she was the best person to move forward the American progressive future. Those that believe that the only other possible contender, the Socialist Bernie Sanders, was a better bet are deluded. Hillary in case on forgets was smeared as being too liberal and the major ideological impetus for Trump’s victory was, the euphemistically named, ‘alt right’. 

It had to have been devastating; in fact indescribably and excruciatingly so, for the Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. For the second time in eight years, the electoral Gods worked against her. On the first occasion, when all the stars appeared to have been aligned, a phenom in the form of Barak Obama beat her, in a hard fought race, to the Democratic nomination. This time round, after having been given an unexpected run for her money by the curmudgeon Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary, she ran an impeccable campaign, was faultless in the debates, only to be surprisingly pipped at the post by the unlikely, unorthodox, economically shady, morally challenged, bigoted and obscene Donald J. Trump. 

So the long serving public servant, who garnered nearly two and a half million more votes than her opponent, was left to wonder why? It is scant comfort to know that had she got half the votes of  the Third party Liberterians and all of those of the Green Party she would have won reversing Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Fate has indeed dealt her, America and the world a cruel blow. It has been uphill in her career from the word go as she has been relentlessly pursued and demonized by her political opponents for no apparent reason other than she has been a highly successful and capable woman. 

THE PERSECUTION OF HILLARY CLINTON

Clinton has spent fifty selfless years in public service but for whatever reason she has always been the center of controversy. She emerged, in the tempestuous sixties, from College straight onto the national stage as a result of her clearly articulating the anger of the youth. After stints of supporting children’s causes, work which she continued as wife of the Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, she was mercilessly assailed because she kept her maiden name after marriage. Next problem emerged when society blamed her for her husband’s dalliances. - the news cycle was dominated with her comments about Tammie Wynette not about Bill and Gennifer Flowers.  In the White House she was caught in the middle of a right wing witch hunt where Kenneth Starr spent 80 million dollars investigating the Clintons who were accused of a variety of crimes from murder to embezzlement. The sum total of all that was Monica Lewinsky which circumstance heaped more criticism on her head for a variety of reasons. 

After eight highly successful years in the Senate, as Secretary of State she strutted the world stage proving a highly successful diplomat and at the conclusion of her term her approval ratings were sky high. Then once again, when it became known that she had Presidential ambitions, she became the focus of an intense war on her integrity and competence. Two incidents were blown out of proportion. The attack on a Benghazi Embassy where American citizens lost their lives was subject to over ten Congressional investigations and produced zilch. The assault was so partisan that it beggars description - no one blamed George Schultz for the sixty seven deaths in the Lebanese embassy terrorist attack or Colin Powell for 9/11. Yet she was assailed as a murdering liar because she relayed the initial incorrect intelligence as to the motive of the assassins in Benghazi.

AND THEN CAME THE E MAILS COURTESY OF FBI DIRECTOR COMEY

Then came her “e mail scandal” which was to become the center piece of the Trump campaign where she was branded as “crooked’ Hillary. The reason why Trump lead the cheerleading on “Lock her up” chants at every one of his Nuremberg style rallies, was on the Goebels principle: tell a lie often enough and it becomes believed. 

One needs to analyze the genesis of this whole issue that was central to the Trump Presidency. Trump rarely offered policies at his meetings. His agenda was bigotry, broad populism and “crooked Hillary”. In fact the latter was the main event.

Notwithstanding the fact that neither of her Republican State Secretary predecessors used the State Department e mail server she was investigated by the FBI for following their precedent. Jay H. Ell contends the very fact that her e mails were even investigated in the first place was political. The legal standard being tested, as enunciated by the FBI Director, Comey, was whether she had intentionally broke security and or sent potentially classified documents to non security cleared recipients. He had no information to believe that she had in fact committed any crime. Certainly no more than was available to investigate Colin Powell or Condie Rice but nevertheless he went ahead with an interminably long process that hung like a thundercloud over the Clinton campaign. He then finally, in July, announced that, “It was not even close” that she could be indicted.

The FBI Director then went where no public servant investigator ever goes, certainly not publicly and certainly not in the midst of a bitterly fought presidential election, where his inappropriate intervention had already been the basis of Trump’s argument. He offered gratuitous insults informing Clinton, inter alia, that she had been “careless”. This provided enough fodder to continue to keep Trump’s going even though Clinton had ostensibly been exonerated. The Republican leadership however were not satisfied with Comey’s criticisms and excoriated him for covering up for her. The pressure on Comey reached fever pitch when he addressed Republican Congressional leaders who demanded to know why he had “let her off the hook”.

Then inexplicably and without precedent he reported to the GOP congressional leaders that he had a bunch of e mails on her aide’s computer that had emerged from another investigation. This just a week and a half before election day when Clinton’s campaign was on the rise and Trump’s was in the doldrums. The campaign took a hundred and eighty degree turn with Trump regaining the ascendency. Trump claimed that the evidence had to be egregious for the Director to take such action. The outcry against this yet another injudicious intervention which had less hope of yielding criminal motive or action than Comey’s initial move lead him to announce two days before the election that he had no reason to change his July conclusions. (Which in case you aren’t listening contained his opinion about the Secretary’s alleged behavior). 

The Clinton post election analysis put her loss down to Comey’s late intervention. In fact Trump’s whole campaign was fueled by his actions.

ESTABLISHMENT FIGURE

One of the greatest ironies in this cycle was that Hillary had to take the fall for the anger directed towards establishment politics and politicians. She more than anyone else has been in the forefront of change within the context of politics. Anyone can agitate, talk a great game but at the end of the day one has to deliver. Delivering requires votes, usually compromise, caucusing as well as the rhetoric. That was her forte. Trump effectively pointed to her as being the archetype self serving insider. He admitted to all manner of the atrocities but rationalized that it was because he was, for example, “smart”and “paying politicians that delivered for his business”. Hillary was the one in Washington for fifty years and was responsible for this mess. He was from the outside and would “fix it all up”. Then it would return to his theme of “crooked” Hillary and her e mails which hid all manner of evil including her “pay for play” schemes. 

AT THE END OF THE DAY

* So now the same media that set her up for defeat are blaming her for the outcome of their venal agenda. The voters that had the most to loose and bought into the equivalency narrative and couldn’t hold their noses long enough to vote for Hillary will have to live with the consequences. So tragically does everyone else. 

* There is enough blame to go around and the losing candidate has, by convention, to share some of it. Where Hillary can be faulted is her lapse into the cozy world of easy bucks for speeches and smoozing.  But to blame her for Trump’s unscrupulous charisma, the world wide swing to nationalism and xenophobia, the media’s irresponsibility, the FBI’s intervention into politics and the voters’ dereliction of duty, is a little too much. As for the latter 100 million voters who just couldn’t chose between the two "evils", Jay H. Ell has bad news for you, you got one of them anyway.

* One can only hope that the safety measures that the Founding Fathers installed to prevent the Republic being under control of a dictator/king can withstand the onslaught that it is about to endure. 

• As Jennifer Rubin, the Conservative Washington Post columnist maintained history will ask each one of us what we did on that fateful day in November 2016

* The reality everyone is still grappling with, both in most of America and in the rest of the world, is how on earth, with all that transpired in the campaign, 60 million Americans voted for a candidate of the worldview, (sic), and character of Donald J. Trump.