Will scandals overwhelm Hillary Clinton?

NAIROBI: As the 2016 US presidential campaign got underway, it looked as if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the clear, scandal-wise. Whatever accusations had chomped at her heels and her husband’s, former President Bill Clinton over the years, she had outrun them.
Still, she seemed to be a part of that web of private law firms, private fees, private investments and private connections that gives politics-as-usual a bad name.

Yet, Hillary Clinton had survived, in part because she barrelled through the scandals with stunning resolve.
It puts me in mind of David Begelman. In the late 1970s, Begelman, then head of Columbia Pictures and a major Hollywood mogul, was accused of embezzling $10,000 from the studio. On the day the story broke, it was a bombshell.

But the next day, as all Hollywood sat eating lunch at its favourite restaurant, Begelman walked through the door - tailored, barbered, buffed, shined and looking like a million bucks.

That performance helped keep Begelman afloat, in the short-to-medium run. There hasn’t been anything like Begelman’s proven misdeeds in Clinton’s story, though some of the accusations against her have been worse. Yet, in the face of them all, she has done a magnificent Begelman.

But can she keep doing it? Can Clinton build herself a second act that transcends the past scandals and the question of trust?
We all remember F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are “no second acts in American lives.”

Maybe he was talking about the country’s propensity to see a life as a single arc of success or failure. Once you’re tarnished by public scandal, Fitzgerald seemed to be asserting, you are permanently damaged goods. That principle has been challenged and even discredited in recent years. It has become conventional wisdom that there are many second acts. People fall.

They confess error and claim redemption or pay what we think is a big enough price. Then, they rise again. Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, for example, topped the scandal charts when his walk along the Appalachian Trail led to a very public declaration of an extramarital affair.

He seemed politically disgraced, but he now represents South Carolina in the House of Representatives. Martha Stewart, after being sent to the slammer, is back on TV. Perhaps the harbinger of all this was Charles Colson, an architect of President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate break-in, who found religion and became a force for reform in the US prison system.

Bill Clinton recently took to the campaign trail on his wife’s behalf. He appeared in New Hampshire and talked with his sincerely furrowed brow about how her longstanding pursuit of social justice makes her the best-qualified candidate he ever saw to “restore prosperity” to the country.

Enter Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton had attacked Trump as sexist, a plausible enough accusation. Trump answered that his behaviour was nothing compared to the sexism of Hillary’s husband. He also declared that Hillary Clinton herself did not exactly embody the progress of women in politics - because she was her husband’s enabler-in-chief during his presidency when he was accused of exploitative sexual conduct toward a number of women.

Trump knows that the passage of years has not diminished the power of his accusations. His new video on the issue is a collection of hammer blows. The voice-over is Hillary Clinton’s: “Women’s rights are human rights”; “We must keep fighting for opportunity and dignity.” Her words punctuate a succession of images: Bill Clinton leering at a plump and glowing Monica Lewinsky in her cute little beret.

A “Daily News” front-page headline of the time: “Liar, Liar.” A photo of Hillary Clinton attended by Anthony Weiner, who is married to one of her key aides. A “New York Post” front-page headline on “Weiner’s Rise and Fall” - about, in case you miss the import, Weiner’s sexting scandal. Hillary on a podium with Bill Cosby, who looks as grotesque in the photo as he seems today.

The whole Trump video takes maybe 10 seconds. But it indelibly calls to mind the memory of the country’s embarrassment at Bill Clinton’s behaviour, at the same time when the US public was largely supporting him through the political struggle that accompanied the scandal.

The same may be said for the other Clinton scandals that have re-emerged. First came Benghazi, intimating that Clinton, as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, participated in lying about American deaths.

Then the House Benghazi committee uncovered her private email server, raising questions about her handling of classified information. There were accusations of conflicts of interest involving top Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

Even the name of her famously partisan adviser Sidney Blumenthal reappeared to cast a pall of further scandal over the campaign.
So will the smell of old, un-exhumed scandal catch up with Hillary Clinton?