Willful Blindness

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump require their supporters to avert their eyes and minds.

Donald Trump asserts he isn't a racist.

Trump says he isn't a white nationalist nor prejudiced, and in fact he is not racist when compared with the 1950s "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever!" views of  southern governors who attempted to block blacks from attending colleges.  Some would think a real racist would have drinking fountains marked "white" and "colored" in his casinos, and Trump isn't like that at all.   Indeed, New Yorker Trump is certainly more cosmopolitan and exposed to diversity than most Americans.   Trump asserts that his racial attitudes are simply realistic and typical of Americans and they are perfectly OK because they are realistic and typical. Trump says that when Hillary accuses him of being racist she is accusing tens of millions of Americans as racist, because his thinking is pretty much like that of everyone else. 

But Trump says things that attract the open praise of the KKK and other white nationalists.  He implied most Mexicans are criminals in his inaugural campaign speech,  he said it is only reasonable to be nervous around Muslims and to want to keep all of the them from entering the country and to surveil the ones who are here, he said he would order soldiers to torture prisoners, he said it is only reasonable to think that a federal judge of Mexican extraction would be prejudiced against him.  

Lots of Republicans think Trump is just being blunt.  The group is big but not a majority of voters, which is that problem for Trump.  A great many Republicans--ones Trump is attempting to appeal to now--are uncomfortable with this talk, agreeing with Speaker Paul Ryan that this is "textbook racism."   

What do those uncomfortable people do, if they otherwise generally are OK with Trump and they oppose Hillary Clinton?    They do what Paul Ryan does.   They avert their eyes to the stuff they don't like, then vote for Trump.

Hillary Clinton asserts she isn't crooked.  

I observed in yesterday's blog post that trading access and face time with politicians in exchange for donations of money or service is universal.  Politicians stop by their campaign HQ to thank volunteers and they have gatherings graduated in size and intimacy based on the size of monetary donations,   And I observed yesterday that former cabinet officials and presidents of both parties do celebrity appearances.  They are famous.   They don't sing or play the guitar; they speak.  They draw a crowd.  They are headliners.  

Here is an article on speaker's fees, including those former cabinet officials like Hillary Clinton.   Her fees were right up there with Tim Geithner ($200,000) and Al Gore ($175,000) and a little more than Larry Summers ($135,000) and fellow former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ( $150,000). Her speeches were less than former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke ($200,000 to $400,000) and less than Donald Trump, who reportedly earned $1.500,000 per speech for his "real estate wealth expo" talks back in the late 1990s.

Click here

Washington Speaker's Bureau: Colin Powell

Bill and Hillary Clinton cashed in on their celebrity--just like others--but they went a step farther, which causes the media and her supporters to pause.  Hillary Clinton was a former Secretary of State and she was also widely understood to be eying a candidacy for president in 2016.  She did things in the aftermath of her Cabinet office that are inexplicable.

 Her speeches to Goldman Sachs and others could easily have been foreseen to be politically compromising.   Nobody as politically astute as the Clintons could have failed to know that these would look--and be--evidence of her being "in the pocket" of people she will need to regulate.  A Republican can take money from coal producers and be consistent in saying we need to reduce restrictions on coal, but Democrats cannot take significant Wall Street money and then have credibility saying that they want to regulate Wall Street or break up the very banks that had cratered the US economy.   

She had to have known, yet been unable to resist the easy money.

And then there is the Clinton Foundation.  The Clinton Foundation serves as a private philanthropic do-good organization that serves double duty as a slush fund and job bank for political allies.  At one level it is quite clever and adept.  It serves the same purpose as the American Enterprise Institute or SuperPACs--a place for political allies to have a job creating policy, writing op-ed pieces, flying to conferences to promote the Clintons and do high level networking with powerful American and foreign individuals, interest groups, and governments.   

But as highly experienced politicians Bill and Hillary Clinton knew full well that the revolving door of office holder to lobbyist to special interest to donor is an area that the public thinks is corrupting.  And the players in the system think is corrupting, which is why presidents and senators and congressmen have rules regarding the revolving door and time restrictions on people going from Senator to lobbyist, and from the White House to a business.

Unforced Error.  Utterly Foreseeable.  

The Clintons did not create some conspicuous walls to demonstrate careful disinterest.  They openly continued the arguably very good work of the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State, an area of obvious collusion if not conflict, an area where questions would be inevitable about the connection (undoubtably apparent, even if not real) between a donation to the Clinton Foundation and access to Hillary.  

Anyone could have seen this coming, but they did it anyway.  

If the work of the Clinton Foundation were clearly and obviously domestic (inner city American pre-school, for example) then the Clintons would have an arguable position that there was no relationship between the Foundation and its fundraising and American foreign policy. I could imagine Hillary at the microphone asserting pugnaciously:  "What could be wrong with the Saudi government, which has earned so much from American oil exports, in giving back to help 5-year-olds in Dayton and Akron learn to read?  I am proud to have raised that money to help kids in Ohio and I apologize to no one!")

Hillary Complicaitons

Instead, the work of the Clinton Foundation is foreign, and sufficiently obscure that I cannot describe in any real detail a single Clinton Foundation project or program.  I am sure they do good work, but if it is invisible to me it is invisible to most people.  What is apparent, though, is a fundraising juggernaut, a think tank and job bank but not a public good with a clear articulable charitable purposes.

It just looks sleazy.  It looks too close to the line   It looks like a conflict of interest.   It is probably legal, and it is certainly arguably legal, a statement I make because the Clintons are lawyers who have historically skated right up to legal lines, using fine points and loopholes and gray areas to their full advantage, but at the cost of endless legal hassles.  But what is undeniable is that it looks sleazy and it could have been easily understood to appear sleazy and they did it anyway, even in anticipation of a presidential campaign.  

To ask the same question of Hillary supporters that I asked of Trump's supporters, people who were uncomfortable with Trump's "dictionary definition of racism" if they are uncomfortable with what they see but don't want to vote for the other candidate.  What do they do???  They avert their eyes to the stuff they don't like, and then they vote for Hillary anyway.

Hillary could have attempted a lean-in positive argument for her behavior.  It would be a stretch but Donald Trump doesn't apologize for who he is, and possibly she should make a positive case for who she is, an adept practitioner of a system of elections, power, and favors.    

She could have said:

"You're darned right Bill talked with some unsavory people--and some very good people--and Bill tries to get them involved with the Foundation with moral support, legal support, and donations of money.  Some of those unsavory people, with ugly hateful ideas about women and brutal behaviors toward criminals with public beheadings, are also essential allies in our war on terror.   We are trying to pull them into the community of nations the only way that works, by working with them and finding areas of common concern.  The more connections they have with the USA formally, and with my husband and me personally, the more we can work together to advance American interests.   Diplomacy is not just formal and arms length.  It is personal.   Personal relationships matter.  Foreign governments getting recognized for doing good things matter.   It pulls them in.

 If Donald Trump actually knew any history he would know that the personal relationship between Churchill and FDR was an essential part of the war effort.  At great risk within a war zone they met personally, face to face, repeatedly, during the war.   Bill's work with the Clinton Foundation wasn't to make us rich.  Thank God people bought our books and listened to a few of our speeches, so the money wasn't for us.  We were doing something my husband, as a former president, was uniquely able to do: build bridges between people and governments on behalf of widely acceptable common causes, AIDS in Africa, food security in south Asia, and more.   Mr. Trump doesn't seem to understand you don't make allies and partners by giving speeches saying you hate their guts. You give people something good to work with you on.  That is how diplomacy works when you are pulling people in.  You build networks, you ask people to help and you thank them publicly.  Thanking people when they do good things isn't weakness, it is strength.  We need allies and friends in the fight against ISIS and terror and famine and disease, not more enemies.  Mr. Trump wants to make enemies of the world. "Bomb the s--- out of them", he says.   That's what you say when you are an uninformed bull in a china shop.  The Clinton Foundation is working for a stronger America and a safer world through joint projects and friend building, and that is how it is done in the real world of international diplomacy, if not on reality TV."

Hillary could have tried out that speech, and it might have worked.   She did not. 

Actual bumper sticker: Louisiana, 1991

Better, Hillary might have avoided or minimized the need for the speech by putting up conspicuous barriers to apparent conflicts of interest.   She did not.

Instead, she minimized and mumbled and she forces supporters to sigh and attempt to avert their eyes from the very apparent conflicts of interest and instead focus on Donald Trump.    As they said in Louisiana back in 1991, when the contest for governor was between a corrupt Edwards or a KKK member David Duke:  "Vote for the crook.  It's important."    Better a crook than a racist.