A Leopard Can't Change Its Stripes

A Leopard Can't Change Its Stripes

by Mark Luedtke

We've known for the last 6 years that Hillary Clinton is the Democrats' anointed candidate in 2008. Forget the hype around the empty suit, Barack Obama. Al Gore's attempt to ride the weather through the backdoor won't work. John Edward's channeling of dead little girls to motivate himself won't enable him to overcome the left's misguided infatuation with Hillary either. No matter how bad her policies, her personality, and her gaffs, Hillary will win the Democratic nomination.

Hillary hasn't been in the race two weeks, and we've already seen how inept she is personally, as a candidate, and policy maker. Her response to Iraq still being an issue in 2009: she really resents it. She jokes her past dealings with evil men (she won't say who) have prepared her to deal with Osama bin Laden. Her response to ExxonMobile's record profits: she wants to steal the money from stockholders. And she's already made up her mind on Iraq – never mind what might happen in the next two years – she'll bring US troops home as soon as she becomes President.

While making these foolish comments in discussions with voters, Hillary looked about as comfortable as a drowning cat. Had this been anybody but Hillary Clinton, we would have already laughed the candidate out of the race. But not Hillary, because she's anointed even though she makes all the Democratic candidates of the last 20 years look like grand statesmen by comparison. Including Kerry and Dukakis.

But we're not limited to two weeks to judge Hillary. Her candidacy is unique because never before have we had a chance to watch such a shrewd, calculated, yet inept, political transformation so publicly for so many years. She took the nation by storm as Bill Clinton's equal partner, a feminist icon, and immediately drew up a titanic socialized medicine plan that would have made Canada's look successful. All claws and fangs, she would have imprisoned us for trying to get services from our own doctors. Now she wears soft pastels, pearls and lockets in an attempt to fool voters, but she's no June Cleaver.

Hillary worked hard during the intervening years to earn her impressive 45% negative rating.

Most of America was happy to put Bill Clinton's presidency behind us, but to evaluate Hillary, we're forced to review the pathos of the Clinton administration and Hillary's role in it. Some will think that unfair, but consider if Laura Bush ran for President in 2016, we would also have a duty to revisit the Bush presidency and ask hard questions about the policies, scandals, and the role of the First Lady, using the light of history as our guide.

And as much as the mainstream media loves Hillary, they love themselves more. And as much as Democrats love Hillary, the other Democratic candidates love themselves more as well. Bill Clinton, through deft political maneuvering and personal charisma, managed to escape without ever adequately answering for the myriad scandals and bad policies of his administration. Hillary will have to answer those questions, without Bill's skills or him in front, and there are no good answers.

Hillary will have to answer for her role in the Whitewater scandals. She personally authored the legal brief that enabled one of the many Whitewater scams – Castle Grande. Several of her partners in the Whitewater scams have been imprisoned for fraud, but Hillary has never answered for her role. She's never answered for her role in hiding subpoenaed documents relating to the scams for over two years before they were found in her apartment.

Hillary will have to answer for her role in removing documents from Vince Foster's office after his suicide. After speaking with Hillary, her chief of staff personally removed the documents so the FBI couldn't see them. What was Hillary trying to hide?

Did Hillary have a role in Clinton's China policy? Bill gave China most favored nation trade status right after taking office despite campaigning as a China hardliner. The large campaign donations he received from the Chinese military through obvious intermediaries after taking office must have changed his mind. Later Bill personally stopped prosecutions of companies who gave China missile guidance technology after receiving large campaign contributions from those companies. Hillary was her husband's fundraising partner. Does she stand by her husband's actions?

Bill Clinton's weakness on terrorism empowered al Qaeda and precipitated 9/11. We now know that Sandy Berger, Bill's national security advisor, destroyed classified documents regarding Bill's response to terrorists to keep them from the 9/11 commission. Does Hillary support her husband's terrorism policies, and does she support theft and destruction of documents to cover up his decisions?

Hillary is the worst of the field, but she'll probably run against either John McCain, who will put us in jail for exercising supposedly free political speech, Rudy Giuliani, who doesn't trust anybody but his bodyguards with a gun, or Mitt Romney who is undergoing the Republicans' version of Hillary's finger-in-the-wind political transformation. Where's the candidate for freedom? Worse than ever before, the two parties will present us with a choice between the slightly lesser of two great evils in 2008.