Saturday Email Bag -- Why Is Hillary Clinton Still Standing?

It's Saturday email bag time again. Most of your emails were about Iran and the Middle East. But, I received one email that asks a fascinating question that is almost unanswerable. Here's the question --- "Granted the Democrats have no real choice except Hillary right now. But what is the driving force to have this 'low life' become a possible president. We've had 8 years of her and her husband, 8 years of Obama. Our economy is a mess, we have NO foreign policy, our military is in a shambles, our international friends want little to do with us. Hillary Clinton has at least 4 major scandals that would bring down a Republican. If they were stockbrokers, they'd be in jail. Physicians, they'd lose their medicare license. Lawyers can be disbarred for half what they have done. Question is : WHY? Why this special treatment and special allowances to break the law, break their Oaths of Office, break the confidence of the people and yet the people just fall over their feet to elect these carpetbaggers of the 20/21st century. Why? Thank You." This is a question that mixes politics, ethics, religion and psychology. And each person will see the answer filtered through one of these lenses. But let's talk it over. ~~~~~ This week the Boston Globe wrote a long piece about the "unprecedented ethics promise" that was pivotal in Hillary Clinton winning confirmation as Secretary of State. The Senate was concerned about conflicts of interests with the Clinton family charities. But a memorandum of understanding was praised by the new Obama administration, the Clintons and then-Senator John Kerry as providing the transparency and ability to review Clinton charities actovities that could pose conflicts ofvibterest for Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The memorandum, which did not set a penalty for failing to comply, had been signed in December 2008 by Valerie Jarrett, co-chairwoman of the Obama transition team, and Bruce Lindsey, a longtime Clinton aide who at the time was CEO of the Clinton Foundation and sits on the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. At the hearing, then-Senator Clinton answered questions by pointing to the highly specific contents of the agreement and the broad pledges for disclosure. The agreement said the Clinton charities and the Obama administration wanted to “ensure that the activites of the [Clinton Foundation and its affiliated organizations], however beneficial, do not create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State." All donors were required to be disclosed. Existing streams of donations from foreign countries did not have to be submitted to the State Department for possible ethics reviews. But it required that Clinton charities disclose to the State Department when foreign nations “increase materially’’ their commitments to the charities. Clinton said at the time that the agreement went “above and beyond the requirements of the law and the ethics rules” to “avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest” between the foundation and her role as Secretary of State. Kerry made the decisive Senate speech on January 21, 2009, saying : “Transparency is critically important here obviously, because it allows the American people, the media, and those of us here in Congress...to be able to judge for ourselves that no conflicts - real or apparent - exist.’’ Kerry’s Senate speech in her defense help clear the way for an overwhelming confirmation vote, 94-to-2. ~~~~~ Everyone was happy. What happened? The Globe has confirmed that the Clinton Health Access Initiative never submitted information on any foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure from 2009 to 2013, Maura Daley, the organization’s spokeswoman, said the charity deemed it unnecessary, except in one case that she described as an “oversight.” During that time, grants from foreign governments increased by tens of millions of dollars to CHAI, a Boston-based organization, yet Daley’s recent acknowledgement was the first by CHAI of the broad scope of its failures to fulfill the spirit of a crucial political pledge made by the Clinton family and their charities. The health initiative has previously acknowledged failing only to disclose the identity of its contributors, another requirement under the agreement. The failures make CHAI "a prominent symbol of the broken political promise and subsequent lack of accountability underlying the charity-related controversies that are dogging Clinton as she embarks on her campaign for President," according to the Globe, which said that Jarrett and Lindsey declined to be interviewed, and that the White House and State Department also declined to take a firm stand on the apparent violations of the agreement. The State Department released a brief statement : "We would have expected that CHAI identify for the department the foreign country donors that elected to materially increase their donations and new country donors. The State Department believes that transparency is the critical element of that agreement,’’ said Alec Gerlach, a Kerry spokesman. ~~~~~ A Republican Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee who voted in favor of Clinton’s confirmation in 2009, John Barrasso of Wyoming, said the lack of adherence to the basic terms of the agreement raised questions about her promise. “I took her at her word. Maybe I was wrong to do that,” he said in a Globe interview. “Because now the evidence shows that she didn’t disclose any of these things. The interesting part is you would think that for all of their time in the White House and time in the Senate, that she would want to be very far away from the hint of this kind of problem.” Dan Diller, a member of the committee’s Republican staff when Clinton was confirmed, said it's difficult to comprehend why CHAI didn’t disclose its foreign grants to the State Department. “If it is just a pass through to do good works that the whole world is cheering then what could possibly be the harm in disclosing the donations?....I don’t understand why they would not trumpet their success and get credit for transparency in the process." ~~~~~ CHAI declined until this week, when it responded with an e-mail to repeated questions from the Globe, to answer the question of whether it had ever initiated State Department review for any of its foreign donations : "The answer was no." ~~~~~ A new AP-GfK poll shows that Hillary Clinton's struggles to explain her email practices while in government, which the public sees as meaning she has things she wants to hide, along with questions about the Clinton Foundation and Republican criticism of her openness, wealth, and trustworthiness, seem to have struck a nerve in the public's perception of the dominant Democratic figure in the 2016 campaign. In the survey, 61% said "honest" describes her only slightly well or not at all -- including 40% of Democrats and 60% of independents. Only 34% of Democrats are "excited" that she is going to be their 2016 candidate. ~~~~~ Dear readers, how does this answer the question "why?" A recent National Journal article said: "Hillary Clinton doesn't play by the rules. That's not a partisan attack. It's not a talking point. It's not a fantasy. It's a fact - an agonizing truth to people like me who admire Clinton and her husband, who remember how Bill Clinton rose from a backwater governorship to the presidency on a simple promise: He would fight for people who "work hard and play by the rules." The evidence is overwhelming and metastasizing....Hillary Clinton is a congenital rule-breaker. WHY? From a psychological viewpoint, perhaps Hillary doesn't play by the rules because she has never internalized them - because she can't reconcile rules with her superior intelligence that can argue away their validity when applied to her. From a religious viewpoint, although she says her faith is central in her life, she may be "religious" in the sense of having a one-on-one relationship with God, but not with His other children, whom she may never have learned to love as herself. Ethically, Hillary could be a Hedonist -- position, money, preference, the "I" approach to life. Hillary may not have developed the inner peace that leads to enjoying life without needing to conquer it by any means, even by breaking the rules. But -- politically, Hillary Clinton is skating on thin ice. The sound of her voice is detested by half of Americans, her Party senses that it may have put its money on the wrong horse, her trustworthiness is questioned because she can't obey even a modicum of the rules she foists on everyone else. WHY is she still seen as a viable candidate worthy of public trust? The answer is that her life is not over. "The fall from grace is steep and swift, and when you land, it does not make a sound, because you are alone." (Cari Williams). Unless as Aeschylus said, "in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."