A governance review by an outside law firm reported that some donors “may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gifts.” You need an outside law firm to tell you that? If your Sultanic heart bleeds for Haiti, why not give to Haiti directly? Because if you give through the Clintons, you have a claim on future favors.
The soullessness of this campaign — all ambition and entitlement — emerges almost poignantly in the emails, especially when aides keep asking what the campaign is about. In one largely overlooked passage, Clinton complains that her speechwriters have not given her any overall theme or rationale. Isn’t that the candidate’s job? Asked one of her aides, Joel Benenson: “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?”
It’s that emptiness at the core that makes every policy and position negotiable and politically calculable. Hence the embarrassing about-face on the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the popular winds swung decisively against free trade.
So too with financial regulation, as in Dodd-Frank. As she told a Goldman Sachs gathering, after the financial collapse there was “a need to do something because, for political reasons . . . you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.”
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