​    My fellow pro-Hillary Americans, let’s face it: this whole eleventh-hour e-mail nightmare  is one hundred per cent our own candidate’s fault. 

 It’s not FBI Director James Comey’s fault. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault. It’s not the Republican Party’s fault.  It’s not Huma Abedin’s fault, and (for once) it is not Anthony Weiner’s fault. Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is the one who decided to have that stupid server set up in that stupid basement in that stupid house. If she had not done that, Comey and company would not have anything to do to her now.  For the hundredth or thousandth time, if she had not given in to her famous instinct to hide things, she would not now be suffering from the toxic perception that she must have things to hide. 

  Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing that I can imagine Hillary Clinton having done, tried to do, or thought about doing to our country in the dark that would strike me as one-sixtieth as frightening as almost everything  that her opponent — and for that matter, almost all of her opponent’s competition for the Republican nomination — routinely swear on their respective stacks of Bibles to do in broad daylight.  If tomorrow those e-mails revealed Hillary Clinton to have been sexting with Anthony Weiner over their mutual lusting to  quintuple NAFTA, open all our borders, and embroider  the phrase  “Black Lives Matter” into the underwear of  every police officer in America, I would not hesitate to vote for her over the racist, sexist, Islamophobic,  isolationist all-purpose blowhard ignoramus  she is running against.  And of course,  the odds are overwhelming that in the end, those e-mails are going to reveal a whole lot of almost-nothing, like always, leaving her friends bitter; her enemies enraged;  and everyone else bewildered that such brilliance and such ineptitude can have lived together  in one person for such a long time.

I have always been in Group Three, plus I like NATO, so  I hope Clinton gets elected in spite of this mess. In fact, I hope (against hope) that she gets a Democratic House and Senate because of it.  That’s perverse, of course: Logically, this last-minute derangement should only strengthen one’s deeply American impulse to put a check on the power of the President. Unfortunately, no currently imaginable Republican Congress  will provide a check on this president. They’ll tie a noose around the neck of her tenure, tighten it with a series of un-endable investigations, and proceed to hang the country.  I’m against that. 

Just because I am  “with her”, however, I am not  going to pretend that at this moment of white-hot crisis, Hillary Clinton is primarily a victim of anyone other than Hillary Clinton. None of her other supporters should pretend that, either.

 It is at precisely such a moment that we most need to face our least-favorite fact. Hillary’ Clinton’s impulse toward self-shrouding  — perhaps not unlike Bill’s impulse toward womanizing — is a deeply ingrained personal trait with potentially dire public consequences. Happily, those consequences can be easily avoided, if only she chooses to avoid them. Why is it so hard for this bright woman to accept a reality that she has spent her whole life creating? Being who she is and having taken the path that she has taken to where she is, Hillary needs to abandon any attempt to skirt public disclosure of anything she does other than make a poo-poo.  Any such attempt will backfire. It will leak, it will fester, it will look different in the light of day.


It is incredible that coming up on forty years of life in effigy, she  still needs to be convinced of this, but someone does need to convince her.  Maybe it’s  Chelsea,  who seems to have had her head screwed on straight about goings-on at the  Clinton Foundation and how they would look to everyone other than Doug Band.  Maybe it’s Huma (umm…ok, probably not.)  Maybe it’s her old friend Betsy Ebeling. Maybe it’s revered Methodism founder John Wesley raised from the dead, dusted off, and hauled in as a special counselor.  


Then again, why not bring in some professionals? Assuming she battles through to the Oval, why not hire the president-elect a top-notch secrecy-sobriety coach? Pack her off for some true transition time at Obfuscation Anonymous. Make her write down all her often-justified resentments on little slips of paper (“Still burnt by  offhand cookies-and-tea comment of 1992”…” “Did not kill Vince Foster”… “Blamed for Benghazi by a Congress that had been short-shrifting diplomatic security forever”)  and toss them into the Potomac. Feng-shui the White House so that paranoid vibes flow straight down the toilet. Rejigger her cell phone so that if she dials Sidney Blumenthal, the call reroutes straight to Sean Hannity.  Better yet, chuck that cell phone into the Potomac,  too. George Washington got along just fine without one. 


It’s not just what Clinton needs to stop doing, either. It’s also what she needs to start.  As president, she needs to call a press conference a week. Give loads of  long, open-ended interviews.  Casually misspeak so often that all her casual misstatements get lost in the wash of each other.  In short, she needs to resolve to screw up a whole lot more in public. It can’t be half as damaging to her as all the screwing up in private — or rather, screwing up solely for  the futile effort to operate in private — has been. 


Clinton haters like to crow that at this point, her hide-duck-dissemble routine has become an immutable trait, like eye color. Nonsense. This  is absolutely something that our girl can address. If she  can will herself to become the first woman president, surely she can will herself to an  even more historic feat. To succeed, Hillary needs to do whatever it takes to become the first president who grows less paranoid in office, rather than more.

Step one: she has to look in the  mirror, not across the aisle, for the source of her  woes. 

Those of us  supporting her need to do the same.  National politics has always been rough sport, but when did it become nothing but dueling cults of personality? Whether the issue is personal, legal, tactical, or substantive,  it no longer matters what is said or done. It  only matters who has said or done it. There seems to be nothing that  the rank-and-file  won’t rationalize on their own side, or criminalize on the other side. 

Enough.  

​Sure, it may be the case that Comey timed his letter so as to help Republicans burn Hillary at the stake, as they are predictably and pathetically eager to do. But even if so, the fact remains that by her own actions, she handed them the wood, the straw, and the match.  

She’s gotta stop that.  She’s gotta stop that.

What can I say? She was dressed for surgery, and she cleanly removed his very last chance to get back into this race. 
Then again, by choosing "suspense" over democracy, he assisted brilliantly.

​

Is it possible to glow with cool?

If so, Melania Trump just did it in her sit-down with Anderson Cooper.  Not only did Mrs. Donald appear not to have been remotely crushed by her husband's  ever-expanding  sexual-assault scandal , she almost seemed to have taken it as some kind of spa treatment.

("Shall we rake you over your coals now, Mrs. Trump?" "Yes, please, and make them hot. I am very strong.")

In fact, Melania did come across as strong, but not  harsh.  That's no easy feat for a female. Just ask the one who's running for president.

With almost no  campaign experience,  Melania effortlessly embodied the four c's that distinguish the flawless-diamond class of absolving  political spouse from the mere trouper-type gems. She was calm, cool, collected -- and seemingly utterly convinced that her husband's years of misconduct  had been cynically manufactured by a media in clear cahoots with his enemies. 

It was as if Monica-era Hillary had been turned toward an opposite-wing conspiracy theory, poured into the form of an Eastern European supermodel, pointed toward a camera and told to sing for her husband's life.
​
But not, one suspects in this case, her own.

First things first: 
I believe that, by virtue of his, um, “dalliance “ with Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton sacrificed his second term — and any hope of Al Gore’s getting a first term — to his penis. 
I concur with Bill and Hillary Clinton that they have long been the targets of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” hell-bent on shooting their agenda down — which I consider all the more reason to have been enraged with Bill for handing that conspiracy such a powerful bullet. (I say “have been” because nearly twenty years and two full presidencies have gone by since then. Enough already.)
Nonetheless, when the subject does arise, I am now, as I was then, intellectually perplexed and morally appalled by those Democratic partisans who seemed to believe that the (alleged) transgressions of then-Supreme-Court nominee Clarence Thomas and the (confessed) transgressions of then-Senator Bob Packwood  made them unfit for human interaction, let alone public service. Yet pretty soon after, these selfsame partisans were eager to downplay the inherently abusive nature of the relationship between the president of the United States and an intern. 
At   gut level, it bothered me then and it bothers me now that such a feminist president, with such a feminist first lady at his side, ended up serving to revive  an anti-feminist dichotomy that the culture ought, by then, to have left for dead. That dichotomy consisted in the old idea that there are females for substance  (Hillary, Madeleine Albright, Donna Shalala) and there are females for sex   (Monica, Gennifer, et.  al) and it is fine, indeed charismatic or something,  for even the most  illustrious male to dabble in both. But if any of the gals in that second group should tattle in such a way as to inconvenience Golden Boy and his great plans,  she’d better watch out.  
None of that is even what I am posting about. But I wanted to get all of it  out of the way up front because lately, if you are a Hillary Clinton supporter and you express revulsion at Donald Trump’s enthusiastic approach to misogyny, a whole crowd of people on the  right instantly tag you as a big fat hypocrite for giving Bill a pass on all his womanizing stuff, even if you have never, ever done any such thing. 
What I am posting about is how the political dilemma faced by Lewinsky-era Democrats  — not the moral or ethical  dilemma, the political dilemma — essentially differed from the political dilemma faced by Republicans now.  This is, admittedly, old and very political-junkie terrain. But amid the current swirl of “Democrats didn’t give a hoot about this stuff when it was their guy doing it,” it strikes me as worth covering it once again. 
A few points: 
First of all, at the time that the Monica Lewinsky scandal became public, Bill Clinton was a sitting president. For any American political leader of either party to call upon the president to resign is a very different,  infinitely more problematic, action than that of withdrawing support from someone who has yet to become president. (And just to forestall all those “It wasn’t just Monica! How about Juanita and Paula! And Gennifer Flowers spoke up in 1992!”  retorts, let me say:  With regard to Flowers, in my view, a presidential candidate’s having previously had a consensual extramarital affair  — or even many consensual extramarital affairs — does not remotely equate with a current president having an extramarital affair that cannot, by its very nature,   be considered consensual.  Although the alleged rape at its center took place in the 1970’s, the case of Juanita Broaddrick, like that of Monica Lewinsky,  did not take take on national  significance until the Paula Jones sexual-harassment lawsuit went forward, well into Clinton’s presidency. So  it is that late 1990’s time frame that matters.)
Second, Clinton was a sitting, second-term president. Although the Lewinsky affair occurred before he was re-elected, it did not come to public attention until two years after. Had the scandal broken in his first term, it would have been a much larger bombshell for Clinton. At a minimum, some Democratic factions would have seriously considered  mounting a primary challenge, if only for fear of the incumbent’s vulnerability to  attacks on the issue. But Clinton had already won, and he could not run again. Thus,  if you were a Democrat, no matter how disgusted you might have been, you had only two practical options. You could either call upon your party’s leader to join Richard Nixon on the resigned-Presidents page of history — thus aligning yourself with a Republican opposition that was busily becoming its own special brand of repugnant.  Or you could hold your breath and hope that this whole ugly business would resolve itself with minimal damage to Al Gore and the rest of the 2000 ticket, none of whom  had done anything  to deserve punishment for the actions in question. 
Third, Bill Clinton was brilliant. That was the tragedy of him. He was that rare beast who could fully  understand politics and policy, and how truly to interweave the two. Yet he lacked the basic wherewithal not only to curtail his tomcatting for the time he got to live in the White House, but also to keep it away from work. For those who valued the politics-and-policy side of him,  it was like watching a unicorn pee itself.  “He’s so gifted in so many ways,” his wanted-to-be-admirers would say. “If only he didn’t have that.”   
This is not the tragedy of Trump.  Long before this crisis hit, he had already dynamited away mile-wide squares of what should have been his bedrock constituency. Evangelical Christians were already  divided over his candidacy.  Many major GOP donors had already shut their wallets.  The gray hairs of national-security eminences who had served Reagan and/or  Bush(es) were curling with dread at the thought of The Donald as commander-in-chief. The Republican governor of Ohio did not attend the Republican National Convention…in Ohio.  Yes, Trump does have a critical mass of diehard supporters. Yet it is hard to imagine even them saying, “If only Donald could quit walking in on half-naked pageant contestants and then bragging about it, our party and the nation could benefit from his amazing ability to sell our tough stand on immigration  (or whatever) while maintaining, and even growing, our  base.” 
Finally, by the time his fellow Democrats had fallen in line to save him, Clinton had well begun to save himself.  Granted, this was partly by getting Americans to conflate their disgust at him with their disgust at his Republican antagonists. But Clinton also at least went through the motions of a public apology and something of a “doghouse” period at home. If  all that p.r. did come across largely as b.s.,  it was at least sanity-based. It did not involve, for example, attacking the Lewinsky family, or  arguing that by hitting on Monica he had been doing her a big favor, considering how pudgy she was; or any of the other responses that one can imagine playing out with Trump in the center of that scenario. Most relevant,  in years seven and eight of a popular presidency, Clinton  was able to draw upon what had become a very deep well of personal and political good will among a very broad range of Americans. 
Not so Trump. Not remotely so Trump.
Strictly on the sexual-offensiveness front, I’ll leave it to others to delineate the  grossness of Bill Clinton relative to that of Donald Trump  (anybody out there want that job?) But as political headaches for their respective parties, these two horndogs  could not be more different.