The Abnormalization of Hillary Clinton - By Jonathan Chait
September 22, 2016
11:14 a.m.
In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters judged Donald Trump to be more honest than Hillary Clinton by a ten-point margin. It is a finding that boggles the mind. Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud.
Clinton, as I have conceded, has done some bad things born of secrecy and paranoia. But those bad things have not merely tainted her image but defined it. The email story has utterly dominated the public’s impression of Clinton, who is the second-most-unpopular nominee of all time and whose shortcomings compare in the public mind with those of her grossly unqualified, authoritarian opponent. Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.
The news media’s obsession with the emails has, without necessarily intending to do so, conveyed the impression that Clinton committed not just run-of-the-mill political scandals but extraordinary offenses of a historic scale. Indeed, this is exactly what most Republicans, even staunch critics of Trump, believe — for all of Trump’s flaws, she too is disqualified. “He’s awful,” conservative columnist John Podhoretz tells the Huffington Post. “But so is she, and all these arguments about how he’s unprecedentedly awful fail to take account of the fact that the Democratic nominee for president was all but indicted by the director of the FBI. Which means she is too.”
“Unprecedentedly awful” is a high bar. It seems fair if one’s precedent is limited to the current administration, which has had two terms remarkably free of real scandals (that is, scandals that exist outside the conservative fever swamps). But what if we delve farther back into history? Not all the way, to Andrew Jackson profiting off the land he seized from Native Americans, or even to Watergate, Teapot Dome, and Iran–Contra, but to the presidential administration immediately prior to Barack Obama’s?
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