OPINION:
Like everybody else who runs for president of the United States, Hillary Clinton has collected a good number of problems. Some are of her own making, and some that she and her handlers, aides, advisers and expensive experts knew she would have to deal with as soon as she put a dainty toe in the water. Some of her friends are puzzled by how a smart, talented and experienced candidate like Hillary, with ready access to the assistance of some of the most talented political professionals in the business (like that wise head on the pillow next to hers), could bollix up things so badly.
A week ago in Las Vegas, a campaign appearance had gone well enough that she agreed to a rare press “availability.” Hillary doesn’t like dealing with reporters. Most politicians don’t, but the best ones learn, like her husband, to parry unwelcome questions. She’s uncomfortable in unscripted appearances, even a little paranoid, imagining that reporters are “out to get me.”
Toward the end of one of the shortest “press availabilities” of the young season, Ed Henry of Fox News asked her about her email server. Would an aide not have reminded her that she was sure to get such a question? In a flash, she decided that she had spent enough time with reporters, and broke off the “availability,” telling Mr. Henry: “Nobody talks to me about [that] other than you guys.” That one sentence speaks volumes, not only about Hillary, but about her handlers.
The lady is notoriously unwilling to listen to anyone who disagrees with her. In this campaign, she invariably falls back on advice from men and women who have been giving her bad advice from the day they met. She lives not only in the bunker, but in a bunker within a bubble. Handlers like Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin would throw themselves under a train for her, not just a bus, but neither, apparently, can summon the courage to give her bad news and suggest what she could do about it. She might get good advice from Bubba, but she’s learned over the years that she knows better than to trust him.
This campaign was supposed to be different. This time she would listen to the best and the brightest of the Democrats. There would be no repeat of the way her campaign of 2008 exploded. She made John Podesta, who is neither fool nor lightweight, the chairman of her campaign and commissioned him as “the adult in the room.”
Would an adult have told her to lie about her email account, and then try to pass it off as a joke? When the joke didn’t work, and evidence of her connivance and complicity grew, she took counsel from a ghost of the past, and blamed the “vast right-wing media conspiracy” that has been dogging her since she and Bubba first entered public life. Surely an adult in the room would have told her that it probably wasn’t a good idea to portray herself as a champion of the middle class while being photographed on a two-week vacation in the Hamptons where she’s renting a “vacation cottage” for $50,000 a week.
If there’s an adult in the room (and apparently there isn’t) she isn’t listening to him. That’s not very smart.
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