Peddling
access and elite status, the Clintons have turned progressivism into a
lucrative global venture.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Most presidents, before and after
holding office, are offered multifarious opportunities to get rich, most of
them unimaginable to Americans without access to influential and wealthy
concerns. But none have so flagrantly circumvented laws and ethical norms as
have Bill and Hillary Clinton, a tandem who in little more than a decade went
from self-described financial want to a net worth likely over $100 million, or
even $150 million.
The media had been
critical of former president Jerry Ford’s schmoozing with Southern California
elites, with Ronald Reagan’s brief but lucrative post-presidential speaking,
and with George W. Bush’s youthful and pre-presidential windfall profits from
his association with the Texas Rangers. And all presidents emeriti glad-hand
and lobby the rich to donate to their presidential libraries, but with
important distinctions.
One can argue that Jimmy Carter sought donations to his
nonprofit Carter Library and Center out of either ego or a sincere belief in
doing good works. The same holds true of the libraries of the Bushes and
Reagan. No president, however, sought to create a surrogate nonprofit
organization to provide free private-jet travel for the former first family
while offering sinecures to veteran operatives between campaigns. The worth
of both the Clinton family and the Clinton Foundation (augmented by a recent
ten-month drive to raise $250 million for the foundation’s endowment) is
truly staggering, and to a great extent accrued from non-transparent
pay-for-play aggrandizement.
What, then, makes the
Clintons in general, and Hillary in particular, so avaricious, given that as
lifelong public officials with generous pensions and paid expenses they
nevertheless labored so hard to accumulate millions in ways that sometimes
bothered even friends and supporters? Wall Street profiteering aside, why,
while decrying soaring tuition and student indebtedness, would Hillary Clinton
charge the underfunded University of California, Los Angeles, a reported
$300,000 — rather than, say, $50,000 — for a 30-minute chat?
Some have suggested
that Bill Clinton’s impoverished upbringing accounts for his near-feral
ambition to get rich. But he also seized a unique moment in which to do so.
Globalization of the early 21st century and a rather new phenomenon of
progressive Silicon Valley and Wall Street families’ having fabulous fortunes
certainly made the idea of being a multimillionaire many times over hardly
embarrassing in the fashion of the old caricatures of the robber barons in the
days of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Banking, investment, and high
technology seemed a less grubby route to elite financial status than did the
old pathways of oil, minerals, agriculture, railroads, steel, and construction.
The Clintons discovered that one could become very rich from a host of sources
and still be considered quite progressive; indeed, liberal pieties both
assuaged any guilt about one’s privilege and in a more public manner provided
exemption from the logical ramifications of one’s own redistributionist
rhetoric.
After a decade of
loud liberal pronouncements, a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Mark
Zuckerberg, or Steyer brother is likely to be seen as coolly progressive rather
than inordinately wealthy and exploitative. So the Clintons had unprecedented
opportunities to shoulder-rub with liberal financial titans without suffering
the class invective reserved for the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson.
Former vice president
Al Gore is emblematic of the progressive contradictions in leveraging politics
to get rich. After winning the popular vote in 2000 and losing the presidency,
he discovered that the road to multimillionaire status was to mouth green and
progressive pieties while monetizing his political contacts and celebrity among
new networks of the global liberal rich. Fearing that new capital-gains taxes
of the sort he supported would kick in, Gore then rushed to sell a failed cable
station to the often anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, a Middle East media conglomerate
funded from the carbon-exporting wealth of the right-wing royal autocracy in
Qatar.
But Clinton greed was
empowered not just by the unique opportunity of being both a former president
and a liberal operator in the age of progressive billionaires who sought access
and influence. More important, unlike other presidents, Bill Clinton never
quite entered emeritus status. Hillary Clinton was no Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan,
or Barbara or Laura Bush but, while her husband was still in office, sought a
U.S. Senate seat from New York in an undisguised trajectory designed for the
2008 presidential campaign and predicated on the idea that a mature Bill would
de facto be back in the Oval Office as well.
Indeed, well before Hillary
Clinton’s failure in the Democratic primaries in 2008 and her subsequent
appointment as secretary of state, the Clintons had found a way to exploit the
idea that both of them would return to the White House.
That reality gave
them access to quid pro quo opportunities, often funneled through a
philanthropic foundation, of a sort unknown to any past American president. Most
important, the Clintons had long since discovered that public outrage at their
impropriety could be dismissed as the empty and vindictive charges of a “vast
right-wing conspiracy,” be they allegations of sexual assault or criticisms
of Bill’s becoming the highest-paid “chancellor” in the history of higher
education, hired by private for-profit Laureate University at some $4
million a year.
But if the Clintons’
opportunities for lucre were unique — in both what the couple had to sell and
the huge resources of those who wished to buy — and if they could peddle myths
that they were perennial victims of right-wing witch hunts, still, what
accounts for their inordinate greed?
Why not settle for a fortune of $50
million — in Obama’s formulation that “at some point you’ve made enough money”
— rather than risk the public opprobrium of Bill’s globetrotting shakedowns or
Hillary’s efforts to hide personal e-mails that were tangential to her job as
secretary of state?
Their previous embarrassments, from the mundane to the
existential (Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation troubles, writing used
underwear off as IRS deductions, the all-but-impossible odds of making a
$100,000 profit in cattle futures from a $1,000 initial investment, etc.),
all reflect a nonstop drive for lucre.
The answer is likely
that the Clintons thought of themselves as elites: educated, affluent, worthy
of exalted social and cultural status, pillars of Eastern Corridor good taste,
and recipients of media adulation.
In other words, they sensed that they
were entitled to a good life rare for politicians who entered public service
without family wealth or prosperous investments and businesses.
The
Clintons’ quest for riches was probably reinforced by their belief that they
deserved some recompense for all their hard work for progressive causes,
especially when they realized that thousands in their newfound social circles
had access to multiple homes, private-jet travel, and expensive socializing but
were no more gifted than they and had hardly sacrificed commensurately for the
public good.
The Clinton litany of
whiny victimization and excuse-making reflects that sense of entitlement — one
not uncommon among academics, journalists, and politicians who believe that
those in the business world hardly deserve to enjoy more opulence than do those
who are more refined and cultured. In sum, the Clintons left the presidency at
a historic moment of globalized wealth creation, especially in fields
considered progressive and green.
They were unique in that, unlike other
retiring first families, who could offer wealthy profiteers little more than
nostalgic signed group portraits, they could provide an avenue to the buying
of influence in a second Clinton presidency.
They felt no shame about their
drive for riches, not just because they were liberals who sacrificed for the
underprivileged and therefore deserved their belated rewards, but also because
they were convinced that, as correct-thinking elites, they needed a vast
fortune commensurate with their sense of self-worth.
There was a final
component to the Clinton fortune: Both were shameless. If it was a
choice of earning opprobrium for raking in $300,000 from a cash-strapped
university for a 30-minute chat or, a few months after stepping down as
secretary of state, earning $225,000 from Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton
always chose the money over the chance to skirt embarrassment.
For now, the Clintons
again have avoided the final wages of the classical sequence of overweening
greed (koros) leading to arrogance and disdain (hubris)
descending into a sort of recklessness (ate) and ultimately earning
divine retribution (nemesis). But the tragedian Sophocles reminds us
that for such people there is never self-reflection or enough money — and thus
nemesis is still on the Clinton horizon.
– Victor Davis Hanson
is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. This piece
originally appeared in the August 1, 2016, issue of National Review.
