By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Most presidents, before and after holding office, are
offered multifarious opportunities to get rich, most of them unimaginable to
Americans without access to influential and wealthy concerns. But none have so
flagrantly circumvented laws and ethical norms as have Bill and Hillary
Clinton, a tandem who in little more than a decade went from self-described
financial want to a net worth likely over $100 million, or even $150 million.
The media had been critical of former president Jerry
Ford’s schmoozing with Southern California elites, with Ronald Reagan’s brief
but lucrative post-presidential speaking, and with George W. Bush’s youthful
and pre-presidential windfall profits from his association with the Texas
Rangers. And all presidents emeriti glad-hand and lobby the rich to donate to
their presidential libraries, but with important distinctions. One can argue
that Jimmy Carter sought donations to his nonprofit Carter Library and Center
out of either ego or a sincere belief in doing good works. The same holds true
of the libraries of the Bushes and Reagan. No president, however, sought to
create a surrogate nonprofit organization to provide free private-jet travel for
the former first family while offering sinecures to veteran operatives between
campaigns. The worth of both the Clinton family and the Clinton Foundation
(augmented by a recent ten-month drive to raise $250 million for the
foundation’s endowment) is truly staggering, and to a great extent accrued from
non-transparent pay-for-play aggrandizement.
What, then, makes the Clintons in general, and Hillary in
particular, so avaricious, given that as lifelong public officials with
generous pensions and paid expenses they nevertheless labored so hard to
accumulate millions in ways that sometimes bothered even friends and
supporters? Wall Street profiteering aside, why, while decrying soaring tuition
and student indebtedness, would Hillary Clinton charge the underfunded
University of California, Los Angeles, a reported $300,000 — rather than, say,
$50,000 — for a 30-minute chat?
Some have suggested that Bill Clinton’s impoverished
upbringing accounts for his near-feral ambition to get rich. But he also seized
a unique moment in which to do so. Globalization of the early 21st century and
a rather new phenomenon of progressive Silicon Valley and Wall Street families’
having fabulous fortunes certainly made the idea of being a multimillionaire
many times over hardly embarrassing in the fashion of the old caricatures of
the robber barons in the days of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Banking,
investment, and high technology seemed a less grubby route to elite financial
status than did the old pathways of oil, minerals, agriculture, railroads,
steel, and construction. The Clintons discovered that one could become very
rich from a host of sources and still be considered quite progressive; indeed,
liberal pieties both assuaged any guilt about one’s privilege and in a more
public manner provided exemption from the logical ramifications of one’s own
redistributionist rhetoric.
After a decade of loud liberal pronouncements, a Warren
Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, or Steyer brother is likely
to be seen as coolly progressive rather than inordinately wealthy and
exploitative. So the Clintons had unprecedented opportunities to shoulder-rub
with liberal financial titans without suffering the class invective reserved
for the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson.
Former vice president Al Gore is emblematic of the
progressive contradictions in leveraging politics to get rich. After winning
the popular vote in 2000 and losing the presidency, he discovered that the road
to multimillionaire status was to mouth green and progressive pieties while
monetizing his political contacts and celebrity among new networks of the global
liberal rich. Fearing that new capital-gains taxes of the sort he supported
would kick in, Gore then rushed to sell a failed cable station to the often
anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, a Middle East media conglomerate funded from the
carbon-exporting wealth of the right-wing royal autocracy in Qatar.
But Clinton greed was empowered not just by the unique
opportunity of being both a former president and a liberal operator in the age
of progressive billionaires who sought access and influence. More important,
unlike other presidents, Bill Clinton never quite entered emeritus status.
Hillary Clinton was no Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, or Barbara or Laura Bush but,
while her husband was still in office, sought a U.S. Senate seat from New York
in an undisguised trajectory designed for the 2008 presidential campaign and
predicated on the idea that a mature Bill would de facto be back in the Oval
Office as well. Indeed, well before Hillary Clinton’s failure in the Democratic
primaries in 2008 and her subsequent appointment as secretary of state, the
Clintons had found a way to exploit the idea that both of them would return to
the White House. That reality gave them access to quid pro quo opportunities,
often funneled through a philanthropic foundation, of a sort unknown to any
past American president. Most important, the Clintons had long since discovered
that public outrage at their impropriety could be dismissed as the empty and
vindictive charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” be they allegations of
sexual assault or criticisms of Bill’s becoming the highest-paid “chancellor”
in the history of higher education, hired by private for-profit Laureate
University at some $4 million a year.
But if the Clintons’ opportunities for lucre were unique
— in both what the couple had to sell and the huge resources of those who
wished to buy — and if they could peddle myths that they were perennial victims
of right-wing witch hunts, still, what accounts for their inordinate greed? Why
not settle for a fortune of $50 million — in Obama’s formulation that “at some
point you’ve made enough money” — rather than risk the public opprobrium of
Bill’s globetrotting shakedowns or Hillary’s efforts to hide personal e-mails
that were tangential to her job as secretary of state? Their previous
embarrassments, from the mundane to the existential (Whitewater, the Clinton
Foundation troubles, writing used underwear off as IRS deductions, the
all-but-impossible odds of making a $100,000 profit in cattle futures from a
$1,000 initial investment, etc.), all reflect a nonstop drive for lucre.
The answer is likely that the Clintons thought of
themselves as elites: educated, affluent, worthy of exalted social and cultural
status, pillars of Eastern Corridor good taste, and recipients of media
adulation. In other words, they sensed that they were entitled to a good life
rare for politicians who entered public service without family wealth or
prosperous investments and businesses. The Clintons’ quest for riches was
probably reinforced by their belief that they deserved some recompense for all
their hard work for progressive causes, especially when they realized that
thousands in their newfound social circles had access to multiple homes,
private-jet travel, and expensive socializing but were no more gifted than they
and had hardly sacrificed commensurately for the public good.
The Clinton litany of whiny victimization and excuse-making
reflects that sense of entitlement — one not uncommon among academics,
journalists, and politicians who believe that those in the business world
hardly deserve to enjoy more opulence than do those who are more refined and
cultured. In sum, the Clintons left the presidency at a historic moment of
globalized wealth creation, especially in fields considered progressive and
green. They were unique in that, unlike other retiring first families, who
could offer wealthy profiteers little more than nostalgic signed group
portraits, they could provide an avenue to the buying of influence in a second
Clinton presidency. They felt no shame about their drive for riches, not just
because they were liberals who sacrificed for the underprivileged and therefore
deserved their belated rewards, but also because they were convinced that, as
correct-thinking elites, they needed a vast fortune commensurate with their
sense of self-worth.
There was a final component to the Clinton fortune: Both
were shameless. If it was a choice of earning opprobrium for raking in $300,000
from a cash-strapped university for a 30-minute chat or, a few months after
stepping down as secretary of state, earning $225,000 from Goldman Sachs,
Hillary Clinton always chose the money over the chance to skirt embarrassment.
For now, the Clintons again have avoided the final wages
of the classical sequence of overweening greed (koros) leading to arrogance and disdain (hubris) descending into a sort of recklessness (ate) and ultimately earning divine
retribution (nemesis). But the
tragedian Sophocles reminds us that for such people there is never
self-reflection or enough money — and thus nemesis is still on the Clinton
horizon.
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