It almost sounds like Hillary Clinton is a hostage who needs to be rescued according to New Republic writer Rebecca Traister. And who is holding poor Hillary hostage? Why, her own husband, Bill Clinton. According to Traister, Hillary is a poor innocent who has been tainted by the activities of Bill, especially as regards the Clinton Foundation. Traister's solution can be seen in the very title of her article: The Best Thing Hillary Could Do for Her Campaign? Ditch Bill.
Traister's attempt to hermetically seal Hillary off from Bill's nefarious activities has resulted in some real howlers as we shall see. Now let the curtains rise on the dramatic Traister train scene after Hillary conceded in 2008:
We wondered, then, about the possibility that Clinton might someday run for president again. At that moment, with tempers in the Democratic Party still blazing, it seemed awfully remote. But, we agreed, we could both picture it. There was just one big piece of baggage she’d need to lose first: Bill.
We weren’t advocating for divorce, per se. Let’s just say that we were speculating about ways that she might meaningfully disassociate herself, professionally and politically, from her ever-lovin’ husband, the man who, during the course of her recently concluded campaign, had made more trouble than he was worth.
Fast forward five years and Hillary was cruising toward an easy presidential victory...except for the ugly fact that she got entangled with Slick Willie again:
By the time Hillary left the State Department in 2013, there wasn’t any question that she was cruising toward 2016 on her own steam, her baggage—Benghazi, Syria, her concussion—refreshingly hers alone. All she had to do was write a memoir, give some speeches, take some photos with her soon-to-be-born granddaughter, hire a campaign team, and she was good to go.
So what did Hillary do? She promptly re-ensconsed herself in her husband’s orbit, going to work at his philanthropic foundation and installing herself there so concretely that its name was changed to The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Yes, once again poor, innocent Hillary (who made sure to delete thousands of her Secretary of State emails from her personal server) was caught up once again in an ethical tangle created by Bill and only Bill. Got that?
“So yes, we made mistakes,” begins the key paragraph in the statement that Clinton Foundation CEO Maura Pally released in response to Clinton Cash. Hillary’s—in homing straight back to Bill’s murkier world after leaving her perch at the State department—felt like the first unforced error of her 2016 campaign.
The unexpected rechanneling of energy away from Hillary’s personal ambitions and back toward her husband is not without precedent. In fact, contra her reputation as America’s most ambitious, craven, and self-serving First Lady, Hillary’s path has long wound loyally around Bill’s, nearly always to his benefit and her detriment. Returning to his side may be a reflexive habit developed in the era in which Hillary was raised and less well suited to the one in which she wants to become president, but it’s one that she—and he—need to break.
And now we come to a scene which I wish had been recorded in beautiful high definition by a GoPro camera. Yes, I know the scene is from the 1970s, about 40 years before the camera was invented, but the scene laid out by Traister just begs to have been recorded to live on for all eternity as a comedy classic. So let us go back in time to when Hillary altruistically sacrificed her political career to follow her heart to dear ol' Bill:
Friends and political advisors saw a bright future for young Hillary in Washington, D.C. But as she has written, she “chose to follow [her] heart instead of [her] head” and gave up her political prospects to move with her boyfriend to Arkansas, where his political prospects lay. Both Hillary and her friend Sara Ehrman, who helped her move to Arkansas, have recalled the cross-country car ride during which Ehrman begged Hillary not to chuck her future for a boy. Upon arriving in Fayetteville and finding a crowd of Razorback football fans hanging from lamp posts, Ehrman realized that Hillary was about to settle in “a town full of frat boys wearing pig hats,” and began to weep.
Oh, how I would have loved to have viewed that scene in glorious hi-def of the weeping liberal inside a car mourning Hillary's sacrifice as outside the window insensitive Arkansas frat boys wearing pig hats were hanging from lamp posts. And this was not Hillary's only sacrifice. Read about the indignity of Hillary having to (gasp!) sacrifice her maiden name for Bill:
After marrying in 1975, Hillary kept her maiden name, even after Bill became governor of Arkansas, much to the consternation of some of the state’s traditionalists. But when her insistence on maintaining her distinct professional and personal identity got blamed for Bill’s re-election loss in 1980, Hillary gave in. “I decided it was more important for Bill to be Governor again than for me to keep my maiden name,” she wrote. “Hillary Rodham Clinton”—and with her, the catch-all term “The Clintons”—was born.
Traister returns to her obsession about Arkansas frat boys wearing pig hats only this time it is friends of Bill wearing those hats:
And while lots of the dirtier insinuations about Bill and his foundation are likely false or stretched, it is simultaneously be true that he has some famously questionable taste in associates, and that there probably wouldn’t—couldn’t—be such a mass of buzzing and stinging around Bill Clinton if he weren’t just a little bit covered in honey. After all, many of the extremely wealthy men on whose planes he flies around the world are high-rolling versions of frat boys wearing pig hats.
Poor dear innocent Hillary. Her political career put at dire risk by that nasty Bill:
...we wouldn’t have gotten here if he had taken care to keep it in his proverbial pants: Why were donors to the Foundation undisclosed, despite a promise to the Obama administration that they would be? Why were any mistakes made, per Pally’s concession, when Hillary was holding a crucial federal position and everyone knew she’d likely run for president? This man’s wife has been trying to become the first woman president of the United States and he couldn’t make quadruple sure his Foundation got the taxes right? For that matter, why didn’t he or anyone in his orbit effectively discourage her from returning to the family fold, knowing the complications of a massive philanthropy, understanding the critical attention it was bound to draw?
Finally Traister can no longer contain her anger at Bill as it bursts out in an unintentionally comedic way:
But here’s the thing. She moved to Arkansas. She gave up her name. She wrote a book about a housecat.
GASP! She was forced to write a book about a housecat? Oh, the horror... The horror!
