OPINION:
Nobody much trusts Hillary Clinton. The public-opinion polls have shown that for months. Even her supporters concede that she’s self-centered and given to patronize nearly everybody — Donald Trump-like, you might say. Millions of Americans just don’t like her. Pity the country with a leader whom nobody likes or trusts.
Now we learn that she doesn’t like average Americans any more than they like her. She can at last use vast and ill-gotten wealth to insulate herself from the public she pretends to champion. The latest burst of emails from WikiLeaks tells an interesting story. Early last year Hillary and her inner circle began plotting her presidential campaign, first for the Democratic nomination and then for the general election. Her campaign chairman and longtime friend, John Podesta, contributed his concerns by email. He said he was worried about her evident dislike of “average Americans.” Mr. Podesta wrote: “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans.”
These recent emails, like the tape of an 11-year-old conversation of Donald Trump talking about women in unflattering terms, were never meant to be made public. It’s easy to see why. Hillary was earlier revealed to have told Wall Street donors that she holds two opinions on issues, a lie for the public and the real truth for her donors and insiders. This new leak, of her campaign chairman’s candid revelation that she “hates” average Americans, is devastating. It’s unprecedented in presidential campaign politics.
The Clinton campaign has tried to ignore the revelations in the WikiLeaks disclosures. What can her spokesmen say about her telling the Wall Street fat cats that she “dreams” of “open borders,” enabling waves of the poor, the tired and the huddled masses, no doubt including a few Islamic terrorist sleeper cells, to take over America, and her notion that politicians are entitled to say things in private that they would never say in public?
She wants to treat her campaign as a vast “spin room,” where campaign spokesmen are dispatched to persuade the public that what they see and hear is not what they think they see and hear. She blames the Russians, suggesting that her critics are in the pocket of Vladimir Putin. That hasn’t washed, and even the reporters who want to give her all the breaks are nevertheless beginning to search through the WikiLeaks disclosures to see just how the candidate and her campaign have tried to make fools of the rest of us.
Hillary has been remarkably lucky since she first began spinning tall tales in Arkansas, first in behalf of her husband, and then in behalf of her favorite client, herself. The late William Safire of The New York Times once described Hillary as a “congenital liar,” meaning that the gift of the lie was embedded in her genes, that she couldn’t help lying because she could not tell the difference between the lie and the truth.
Her luck may at last be running out. In these WikiLeaks disclosures, beginning to come almost daily and no doubt to continue until Election Day on Nov. 8, the character, the absence of any sense of remorse, and the dark and sinister skill of the Lady Macbeth once of Little Rock is revealed in full.
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