Purely political
The get-Hillary committee in the U.S. House of Representatives has spent nearly $5 million and existed longer than the select Senate committee investigating Watergate, which was actually bipartisan and productive, indeed historic.
I could have saved these House Republicans all that time and money—if they wanted, which they didn’t—because here is the story:
The attack on the Benghazi consulate in 2012 was a horrible tragedy for which signs existed—signs to which the State Department did not adequately respond—although the most relevant alerts did not get to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally. So she was not directly complicit. But she was institutionally responsible as the head of the State Department.
That’s it. Make your assessment of her, and of her candidacy to be president, accordingly, as your personal judgment dictates. But as Kevin McCarthy let slip three weeks ago, and as Republican congressman Richard Hanna of New York dittoed not long after, this committee was set up not for a simple investigative conclusion, but mainly to peel poll points off Clinton, an assignment it has performed reasonably well.
Along the way, the committee, acting with requisite political savvy and deftness, started spending less time on Benghazi and more on Clinton’s personal server for her emailing as secretary of state. It’s reminiscent of Robert Fiske starting out to probe an old and failed Clinton land deal, then of Ken Starr taking over and winding up fomenting an impeachment of Bill Clinton for sexual playtime with an intern.
You see, once you set up a purely political investigating abuse of power, then the purely political investigating abuse of power may exercise flexibility in adapting to the latest allegation or contrivance or peccadillo.
Then the other day the get-Hillary committee chairman, Republican congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, tried to respond politically to the damage McCarthy had done. He put out a statement alleging that Clinton had received an email from her friend and reformed journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, that contained the classified name of a Libyan informant, and then forwarded it.
It turned out, though, that the CIA did not consider the identity to be classified and that the get-Hillary committee’s website actually published the guy’s name accidentally in the course of trying to generate this political hay against Hillary.
Today the committee goes after Hillary directly, interrogating her through sworn public testimony in an event generally previewed as something of a showdown.
The issue is not so much whether anything new will be learned today. What is more centrally at stake is … well, the next presidency.
It is whether a majority Republican member of the committee can frame his turn at questioning in such a way as to pierce Clinton politically. And it is whether she will again, as in Act One of this political theater in 2013, let somebody get under her skin and beyond her thin patience and cause her to blurt something similarly as wince-inducing and damaging as “what difference does it make.”
She meant, as the context plainly establishes, that we did not know the motivation of the terrorists who attacked the Benghazi consulate in 2012 and killed four Americans. And she immediately added that what we needed to do first and foremost was catch those guys, after which maybe we would find out more about them.
Her exasperated point was that no American lives would be restored by berating her for not knowing at that juncture what those killers were motivated by—whether, as she put it with her all-too-typical indelicacy, they just decided one night to go kill some Americans.
Her choice of words and manner were devastating. She lacks a soft political touch, at least a natural one. She lacks the ability to suffer partisan nonsense, at least a natural one.
Today’s political game-playing will be judged by her ability to develop and apply those natural touches, much as she applied humor and warmth—to which she also is not naturally inclined—in a bravura performance last week in that Democratic presidential debate.
One thing that she mustn’t say, though it’s true and as insightful as anything else, is “stuff happens.”
That truth led to the recent and similar Democratic unfairness toward Jeb Bush.
Talking about the Oregon shooting disaster, and trying to resist gun control because a Republican can’t dare countenance that, Bush said our instinct at such times is to search for government policies to pre-empt these atrocities, but that sometimes the best policy is no policy and that sometimes … well, stuff happens.
His policy sin was resisting any consideration of reasonable gun regulation. His political sin was the fateful utterance of the truth that stuff happens.
Stuff happened on his brother’s watch. Stuff happened on Hillary’s watch.
Saying that is a gaffe. And a sound conclusion.