The toughest job in politics these days is defending Hillary Clinton, mocked brilliantly by The Post as the “Deleter of the Free World.”
Her beleaguered defenders, as they retreat behind the bunker door, are settling on a crude legal defense.
Their mumbo jumbo chorus begins with the claim that she didn’t break any laws by doing government business on her private e-mail and ends with the insistence that everybody does it.
That’s their story, and they are sticking to it — until they are forced to find another one.
That will be soon because, while Hillary’s Helpers may have a point about fuzzy laws, their argument is ultimately futile. She’s not on trial and opponents don’t have to meet a persnickety legal standard to win their case.
She’s running for president — and she must meet a less precise but more difficult standard. It’s the test of integrity, and she’s failed it often during her 30 years in public life.
As the e-mail debacle proves, the leopard hasn’t changed her spots.
The test requires “obedience to the unenforceable,” a phrase my friend Daniel Rose suggests amounts to “doing the right thing.” Rose, a New York builder and philanthropist, uses the phrase in a collection of essays and speeches he has published.
Coined by an English judge nearly a century ago, the phrase was summarized by the late educator John Silber as the “domain” that exists between law and free choice.
“It may include moral duty, social responsibility and proper behavior,” all reflected by the idea of “manners,” he wrote.
Nobody can force you to obey manners — you should do it without being forced. But proper behavior and the Clintons are oil and water. These are the people who tried to steal furniture from the White House!
To them, the concept of “obedience to the unenforceable” must seem as alien as little green men from Mars. They recognize no constraint on themselves other than the outer limits of what’s legal, and sometimes not even that.
They have spent a lifetime parsing words, splitting hairs and cutting corners in pursuit of power. In their world, any behavior not indictable is acceptable.
Their success has come at a cost to the country. Their ability to walk away from multiple collisions with the law, ranging from her suspect profits on cattle futures to his impeachment case, had a corrosive impact on public morals.
Like a political Bonnie and Clyde, their notoriety spawned a generation of pols who aspire to be just like them. Their business is booming, and just about everybody really does do it now.
From town halls to state houses to Washington, American government is growing in size, complexity and corruption. A seeming paradox, though really no surprise, is that the bigger government gets, the less people actually trust it.
Marking new record lows, only 11 percent of Americans now have confidence in the executive branch and only 5 percent in Congress, according to the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago.
It finds that, by contrast, half of the nation has a great deal of confidence in our military.
Something’s going on here and the Clintons personify the cultural rot. Despite the string of seedy revelations, she’s still her party’s front-runner and her quest remains on course.
But if — or, rather, when — other scandals pop up, her helpers ought to recalibrate their strategy.
My modest proposal is this: Stop the ridiculous game of denying her obvious character defects and embrace them as a perfect match for the corrupt era she helped to shape.
Instead of trying to persuade voters that Hillary’s honest, Team Clinton should sell her as a president who will meet the public’s low expectations.
Vote for me, she could say, because you already know you can’t trust me.
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