Hillary's Legacy

Carl Bernstein has a book out on Hillary, the excerpt here on Vince Foster, destroyed in a Clinton presidency. Hillary's best friend, driven to take his own life. Multiple scandals:

The “Travel Office problem” came to acquire huge symbolic importance, not least because of what George Stephanopoulos, the White House communications director, came to describe to some of his colleagues as Hillary’s “Jesuitical lying”.

Not just Bill's a compulsive, skilled liar, Hillary is too, she's just not as good at it. And monumental failure:

“Mostly [these] people thought the idea – the whole system Hillary was setting up – was crazy,” said Shalala.

The foremost concern was that Hillary’s ideas for solving the healthcare problem were too ambitious. Hillary discounted and, according to Shalala, even resented the advice of the naysayers. To accept their judgment would have meant to controvert her most basic notion about herself: that given the responsibility and the power, she could solve virtually any problem she applied herself to by dint of sheer force of will, intellect, study and hard work. [snip]

There was too much mythology about Hillary that stretched the facts, she felt. Shalala had always been made uncomfortable by hyperbolic statements from friends and acolytes of Hillary, as well as leaders in the women’s movement who didn’t know her personally, who put forth the notion that had she pursued her own political career and not deferred to Bill Clinton’s, she would have been a governor or senator in her own right by 1992.

“They assume that [just] being smart is enough,” Shalala said. “And it’s not enough. It’s judgment. It’s experience. It’s being strategic at the right points.” Shalala believed that Hillary often tried to do too many things at once – and later, as her personal and legal troubles accumulated, became distracted.

“She’s also someone who doesn’t do things in depth. Because Hillary’s so smart and well educated, I think people missed the fact [that] she has essentially been his supporter, and his support partner . . . She hadn’t really fully developed an identity until she came up here [to Washington].”

Shalala also noted that, in Little Rock, the Clintons “had always been big fish in a little pond”. Until they got to Washington in 1993 they “had never actually banged up against people as smart as they were. They’d spent all of their adult lives in which they were the smartest people in the room. These were two extremely able people who had not really been tested before. So they really had to learn their way.”

Then there's more confirmation of Hillary as one angry lady. Well, they won't be learning on the job this time, but another Clinton administration would rip the country apart from its first day.

Postscript: Hillary sends Bill to Barack's backyard in Chicago to compete for the black vote. And profile of a young Hillary in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois and beyond ""Hillary was very sharp and Chicago". (This was considered a compliment.) And after last night's debate, let's add this:

Asked what role former President Clinton would play in a new Democratic White House, she said, "Bill Clinton, my dear husband, would be sent around the world as a roving ambassador."

With a roving eye.