Hillary Clinton? Never.

Robert W. Merry

politcs, United States

Stale ideas, with a whiff of scandal.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in Washington as president and first lady in 1993, the Wall Street Journal editorial page went on the attack, suggesting they brought with them from Arkansas a brand of politics that was inherently corrupt, with personal gain routinely and consistently factored into official decision making. The paper took a lot of heat for this line of editorial criticism in the absence of definitive proof of mendacity on the part of the new president and his wife.

Then came the cattle-futures scandal, in which Hillary hauled down a $98,540 profit in cattle futures in less than a year of trading on a $1,000 investment, without maintaining the normally required fund reserve to diminish the risk of leverage. Further, she was advised on the matter by an outside lawyer for Tyson Foods, a giant Arkansas company with big interests before the state government, where Bill Clinton served as attorney general and then governor.

Thus began a pattern that has led us to Hillary Clinton now as the Democratic presidential nominee even as multiple polls indicate that fully two thirds of Americans consider her dishonest and untrustworthy. During the Clinton White House years, following the cattle-futures scandal, came "travelgate," "filegate," and the Whitewater land investment scandal, in which a box of missing papers, under subpoena for two years, miraculously appeared in the White House living quarters—but only in copy form; the originals were never recovered. It seemed that the Clintons were constantly mired in scandal or hints of scandal, always struggling to stay ahead of nettlesome little revelations that raised persistent questions about their ethical rectitude.

There can be no doubt that these episodes from the distant past, combined with Hillary Clinton’s more recent ethical lapses related to her doing public business on a private email server, have contributed to her reputation as a person who can’t be trusted to tell the truth or conduct herself strictly on the up and up.