OPINION:
Poor Hillary. She never got to be the homecoming queen in high school and she’s still trying to make up for it. Since leaving the State Department, she has doubled down in regal style at every turn to draw a caricature of herself that is beginning to look like ruining the last chance that she will have to be the president of the United States.
The evidence has been accumulating. She wrote a memoir that was consigned to the discount bin before she got home from an embarrassing book tour, where she demanded to be treated like royalty, spinning a tale that she and Bubba were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Such a fatuous claim recalls testimony of Nelson Rockefeller to a Senate committee four decades ago, when he said he couldn’t understand how anyone could live on a salary of $50,000 a year — in a time when the average middle-class family of four was taking home $14,000.
Neither Bill nor Hillary were born to the silver spoon, and they’re enjoying the high life now, which is their right and privilege. Anyone who pays $200,000 to listen to a canned speech about nothing deserves to be robbed. But the Clintons have nothing but disdain for those they have left behind. They consider themselves a cut above everyone else and demand to be treated as such. They act as if theirs is a God-given right to flaunt the rules they insist apply to everyone else. Hillary began her career in Washington as junior member of the wolf pack that went after Richard Nixon for acting as she acts now, and she ran jihads against Bill’s critics from the White House, trashed George W. Bush for his administration’s “high-handed lack of transparency,” and she ignores rules, regulations and laws she doesn’t like.
She claims special treatment, which may be worse than the suspicious motives her critics ascribe to her having conducted official business on a private, publicly inaccessible email server. Her assertion that she didn’t follow the rules that applied to everyone else because it wasn’t convenient is the behavior of a spoiled royal, not a candidate for president.
As secretary of state she insisted that low-level employees — the “peasants” — abide by the rules requiring them to use government telephones and emails. She once fired an ambassador for breaking that rule. That is the sort of aristocratic haughtiness that first offended the Founding Fathers and offends most Americans now. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t see this as a problem, and that’s the problem. This doomed her candidacy in 2008, when she last ran for president, and explains why there is no rush to defend her this time. Democrats are terrified that those are birds of prey circling high above her campaign.
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