For those of you who haven’t yet seen the video of Hillary Clinton mocking her email scandal with a comment about disappearing messages, you can view it here on The Hill. The FBI apparently doesn’t think that the controversy is something to make light of even while the worst woman in U.S. politics is making light of her ethics problems and depending on voters who think planting her in the Oval Office is a good idea.
Are a likely one-half of Democratic voters too dumb to notice that their candidate seems to consider them to be half-wits, or are they willing to put anyone in office who sounds like Obama and hearkens back to the days of Bill Clinton?
Worst woman in politics? Voters and the media still say no.
What makes Hillary Clinton the worst woman in politics? She will likely come closer to taking the presidency than any woman ever has and if she wins, it will be amidst a swirl of ethical problems going back to Whitewater that will still be dogging her as she takes the oath of office. That’s not something to be proud of and not something to make fun of on the campaign trail.
Despite her fluctuating poll numbers, it would be a big mistake to equate disapproval with voter refusal to say yes to Clinton. The marriage of politics and lax ethics is something many of us have come to accept (see: A Press Conference is for Liars and the Guilty). Democratic voters, especially those with their hands out, have an especially disturbing habit of overlooking ethical transgressions. If someone has something to offer that you desperately need, it’s easy to ignore their shortcomings (see: Change America? Pander to the Bottom).
The Pew Research Center showed Bill Clinton’s popularity at 71% as the details of his White House dalliance with an intern started to come out.1 Despite what may be the most embarrassing Oval Office scandal ever, when he left office his approval rating was a stunning 66%.
It would be unfair to call Hillary Clinton a media darling. That is something she will never be no matter how lax the coverage and how diligently she practices her canned jokes and stereotyped gestures. It is entirely fair, though, to question why so many Americans still support her insistence that she deserves to be president.
Are Democratic voters willing to trade ethics for one of their own?
Symbolically handing over a server and a USB drive is like showing a picture of a horse after the barn door was left open. As Clinton smirked in the video, things disappear, something we already know thanks to Lois Lerner.
There will be unanswered questions about Clinton’s electronic hijinks no matter what she turns over, but what matters is not what columnists, politicians, and pundits think. What matters is what the voters think. How a candidate can retain any approval rating after badly bungling an exploding ethics scandal while making light of her decisions as if the affront was to her and not the American people defies credulity. The only reasonable explanation is that her supporters simply don’t care and Clinton knows it.
The Hillary Clinton strategy seems pretty simple and straightforward: hope voters forget about ethics, get elected, and worry about the past later. Republicans knew better than to impeach the first African American president. How about the first and worst woman in U.S. politics today to claim the White House as her own?