HILLARY THE ‘ENABLER’
That’s the explosive charge levelled by Trump, who claims she betrayed women by ignoring Bill’s sex attacks — demonising his victims instead
Shortly after I hadd checked into the Marriotttt hotel in Charleston, Westst Virginia, the other day, a familiar figure ambled up to o the reception desk, flankedd by security men and wearing hiss trademark self-adoring grin. looking rather like a stick of candyfloss, with h his fluffy white hair, lobster-pink nose and d beanpole frame, Bill Clinton is now a gaunt nt shadow of the priapic president whose cigarrassisted romps with Monica lewinsky provided d stand-up comedians with a glut of smuttyty material during the Nineties.
he appears older than his 70 years and is arrestingly frail following heart surgery. hisis hands sometimes tremor and his Arkansas drawl is so husky that it is hard to make out his words. one doubts he’d have much use for pretty young interns these days.
however, since the U.S. enjoyed eight years of now barely imaginable peace and prosperity during his presidency (as he never tires of reminding us), Clinton has been forgiven for his sexual predation, along with the many other scandals that sullied his tenure, and his arrival in the lobby of this modest hotel sparked near hysteria.
A military dinner party was in full swing, but the ballroom emptied as the servicemen and their wives clamoured for selfies with him. the staff were similarly awestruck.
‘I just think he’s a kind of crazy guy and I admire him,’ giggled my waitress, a college graduate, when I inquired why she would want to go within a mile of a man with his reputation.
lowering her voice, she added: ‘Anyway, I’d rather have my photograph taken with Bill than his wife. there’s something about hillary I don’t like. I just don’t trust her.’
one heard similar sentiments while following the Clintons on the campaign trail in the coalmining belt of Appalachia — the latest battleground in a presidential contest that must rank among the most ghastly yet compelling political dramas this great democracy has witnessed.
Given that the aspirations of tens of millions of American woman rest on Mrs Clinton’s bid to break through the ultimate glass ceiling by becoming the first female president in the White house, I was astonished that so many love Bill — yet plainly loathe hill.
the latest polls confirm this. While 70 per cent of U.S. women voters despise the misogynistic, thrice-married, testosterone-pumped Donald trump — hillary’s near-certain opponent in this autumn’s election — more than half also have an unfavourable view of Mrs Clinton.
one of the reasons is that many American women still believe she reacted to her husband’s famous infidelities by turning her fire on the lovers he’d cheated with, rather than denounce him.
trump himself marched into this thorny territory this week by talking about a longstanding rape allegation against Bill Clinton, as the republican front-runner sought to counter damaging claims about his own treatment of women.
TrUMp was referring to a woman called Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home manager who claimed in 1999 that Clinton raped her 21 years earlier after she volunteered to help on his campaign to become Arkansas governor.
her claims were denied by Bill Clinton’s lawyer, who called them ‘absolutely false’.
Broaddrick supports trump’s attack on the Clintons, saying that an entire generation of Americans ‘haven’t heard about what Clinton did to the women back in that time; that they need to know’.
paula Jones, meanwhile, sued Clinton for sexual harassment while working as a clerk for the Arkansas government. the case was dismissed on appeal, but not before Clinton had paid her more than £580,000 in an out-of-court settlement.
A third woman, Kathleen Willey, was a White house volunteer aide who claims Clinton sexually assaulted her in the oval office during his first term as president.
this, then, is the backdrop to an explosive tweet trump wrote on tuesday, claiming that Bill Clinton ‘was the WorSt abuser of woman [sic] in U.S. history’.
In an inflammatory new tactic, trump has tried to tie Mrs Clinton to her husband’s sexual misdeeds, citing evidence that she led efforts to discredit his female accusers. In a speech in oregon, he said: ‘She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler. And what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.’
he went on: ‘ Some of these women were destroyed — not by him, but by the way that hillary Clinton treated them after everything went down.’
Quite how hillary will respond remains to be seen, but it would seem that if she can’t command more support from her own sex, despite facing an opponent who has described woman as ‘bimbos’, ‘fat pigs’ and ‘slobs’, there is clearly something fundamentally wrong with her candidacy.
But then, as the polls also show, hillary isn’t much admired by men either, and while the preposterous, frighteningly unpredictable trump looks like being the least-liked presidential nominee of modern times, she is running him a close second in the unpopularity stakes.
the truth is that this election won’t determine which candidate the American public likes most. It will determine whom they hate least.
hillary, of course, is acutely aware of her lack of personal appeal, and that Bill is sprinkled with stardust she will never possess (even though his serial mistreatment of women makes trump seem like a choirboy by comparison).
She also knows that when it comes to revitalising the economy, many would trust trump, who has created a multi-billion business empire, over her. So, ironically, the aspiring first woman president is banking on her husband to swing the contest her way.
this week, she unveiled plans to hand Bill, who narrowly escaped the disgrace of impeachment over the lewinsky affair, a key governmental role should the couple return to the White house.
though he would not be a cabinet member, she told a rally she would put him ‘in charge of revitalising the economy’ — pointing out that he had created 22 million new jobs and record levels of employment as president.
these days, hillary mentions Bill at every opportunity during her speeches, and frequently looks back through a halcyon prism to their eight years in the White house.
her inference is that theirs was effectively a presidential partnership — Clinton Inc — and that, should it be restored, the dynamic would be the same.
While talking to union leaders in Ashland, Kentucky, I listened as she told the crowd she was urging Bill ‘to come out of retirement’. Why? ‘Because he has ‘more ideas in a minute than any person I know’. Needless to say, there was no mention of his foibles.
Nor of those Clinton-era policies that a growing number of economists and political thinkers believe to have precipitated America’s economic decline.
there’s the now despised North American Free trade Agreement, for example, which has seen thousands of manufacturing jobs go overseas and resulted in a glut of cheap foreign imports, forcing American companies to the wall.
or the deregulation of Wall Street, which paved the way for the subprime mortgage fiasco and the Great recession that came in its wake.
It is these catastrophic setbacks which have so damaged the American middle classes, who have seen jobs dry up and incomes drop as globalisation and the struggling U.S. economy threatened the traditional affluence of the most advanced nation on Earth.
HIllAry gets around this by presenting herself and Bill as being synonymous with the good old days, before warmongering Bush and the arrival of obama with his empty promises of ‘hope’ and ‘change’. So it is that, having spent the past 15 years schmoozing dogooding rock stars, billionaires and statesmen to promote his various ‘global initiatives’ (and amassing a vast fortune in the process, much in the manner of tony Blair), Bill is now busily criss-crossing the country to trumpet his wife’s dubious credentials.
Anyone hoping for a double-act on the campaign trail will be disappointed, however. For these days, this is a strictly political marriage, and though they reportedly discuss strategy daily by phone, insiders say they haven’t spent much time together — much less shared the same bedroom — in more than 20 years.
While hillary holds court at their seven- bedroom mansion in Washington DC, surrounded by her circle of largely female friends and advisers, he is either travelling on behalf of the family charitable foundation, entertaining at his penthouse above the new presidential library in little rock, Arkansas, or at their country house in Upstate New york.
the years have been kinder to hillary, however. While he looked worryingly fragile on the stump, 69- year- old hillary appeared suspiciously youthful, prompting rumours she has resorted to Botox or even a facelift to convince the voters she is young and vital enough to be president and Commander-in-Chief.
She is certainly not the frumpy, overweight figure I saw in 2008, when she lost the democratic race to obama. though she still wears those trouser suits, they are now designed by oscar de la renta. She is slimmer, by virtue of a largely vegan diet, and blonde highlights streak the hillary bob these days.
Wisely, someone has also convinced her to stop rolling her eyes and effecting those inane, ‘gee-by-golly-thanks’ expressions when her supporters cheer her.
the overall impression is of a woman so confident of victory that she is perhaps already planning to rid all traces of Michelle obama — for whom she reportedly has scant regard — from the White house.
At the moment, polls predict that she would beat trump.
yet the gap is narrowing, and in West Virginia and oregon in recent days — where she was beaten in the primary elections by her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders — there were signs that trump might yet persuade the electorate he is the lesser of two evils. Even many blue-collar Democrats told me they would much prefer the republican tycoon, with his hard- line policies on immigration, gay marriage and the freedom to carry guns, to Clinton’s brand of liberalism.
In logan, West Virginia, a grimly depressed mining town, hatred for hillary burns as fiercely as the
top-grade coal they produce in ever-decreasing amounts — and here, for once, Bill’s bluster cut no ice. As he clambered out of his limousine, he was confronted by a menacing throng of miners and their families.
The barracking went on as Clinton spoke in a gym, and for a moment he looked so vulnerable and bewildered that you had to feel a pang of sympathy. He won some admiration by stopping state troopers from ejecting the protesters. Had Hillary been there, my guess is she might have been lynched.
However, she clearly chooses her audiences more carefully, and at times her chutzpah was breathtaking. Take her speech in the college town of Athens, Ohio, for example.
As a new grandmother, the former First Lady told her supporters, she was ‘zeroing in’ on the struggles faced by many young families.
WHAT she didn’t say was that her 36-year-old daughter Chelsea is married to a Wall Street investment banker, and that this ‘ struggling’ young couple recently moved, with their 19-month- old daughter Charlotte, into a $10million Manhattan apartment.
Her hypocrisy will not escape the finely tuned political antennae concealed beneath Trump’s combed- over thatch. The Donald has also threatened to rake up the Lewinsky saga and it could prove a vote-winning line of attack.
For leading women’s rights advocates have already judged Hillary’s pretentions to feminism as outdated and phoney. And by seeking to discredit her husband’s sexual victims when she was First Lady, they accuse her of ‘slut-shaming’ — an apparently unforgivable act of sisterly betrayal.
In a damning email to the Daily Beast website, the influential feminist academic Camille Paglia wrote: ‘Hillary Clinton’s feminism is a fraud. She rode her husband’s coat tails to wealth and power, and she amorally colluded in the vilification and destruction of [the women involved in] her husband’s serial abuse.’
That, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump was referring to this week.
The worrying fact is that the Trump bandwagon is gathering momentum, and for swathes of this bitterly divided nation, the self-made maverick — who talks of obliterating Isis by any means necessary, and building a wall across the Mexican border — is eminently more appealing than a return of the Clintons, with all their sleazy baggage.