The moment that everyone but Hillary Clinton has been breathlessly awaiting arrives next Tuesday, and it promises to be a clarifying affair. On October 13, the Democrats who aspire to replace Barack Obama in the White House will gather in Las Vegas for their party’s first of only six debates (just four of which will take place before the Iowa caucuses). The contest promises to be a spirited one, but the health of Democratic politics will likely be revealed by what remains unsaid on the debate stage.
Surely, Democratic presidential aspirants will take the stage on Tuesday night with the aim of burnishing their appeal to the liberal voters who will decide the future of the Democratic Party. Expect the candidates to engage in some rather reckless one-upmanship on issues that Democrats regard as pressing. You can expect to hear Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders brawl over which candidate has the best record of combatting the perennial of inequality of outcomes. You can be reasonably assured that Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb will squabble over the precise nature of the threat posed by the changing climate. You can bet that Lincoln Chafee will… well, he’ll be there.
The prospect of Vice President Joe Biden jumping into the race remains a tantalizing one, and that would suggest the Democratic Party wants a succession and not a coronation. But the true measure of whether Democrats have a race on their hands will come when the issue of the all-consuming scandals that have robbed Hillary Clinton of her primacy in general election polls surfaces – or, rather, whether it arises at all.
The slow drip of information about the Clinton scandals remains a constant one. “Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy [sic] s**t,” wrote an employee at the technology firm that maintained Clinton’s emails server after receiving directives that compelled the company to limit the number of file backups. On Tuesday, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was revealed by an email chain obtained by Politico to have been providing the Clinton family foundation with documents that were later deemed classified. That’s just this week. And it’s only Wednesday.
Team Clinton has been engaged in a ruthless campaign to blunt the charges surrounding her and her staffers’ ethically challenged behavior at the State Department. Clinton, who has asserted since February that almost no one save political reporters and congressional Republicans are interested in the scandalous revelations about her emails, has spent the last week making House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent comments the centerpiece of her campaign.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?” McCarthy said. “Her numbers are dropping.” His artless attempt to appeal to a base of Republican voters hungry to see the fight in the eyes of congressional leadership proved a godsend for Clinton. Her campaign has spent every waking minute and a substantial financial investment highlighting these comments and suggesting they reflect the partisan nature of the investigation into her conduct before, during, and after the deadly Benghazi attacks. On Thursday, liberal Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter submitted a resolution demanding that the Select Committee on Benghazi disband on the grounds that it had violated congressional ethics rules by targeting Clinton.
“Hillary is using the McCarthy gaffe to remind Democrats just how hated she is by Republicans,” COMMENTARY’s John Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post. He observed that plugged-in campaign reporters have noted that Clinton’s campaign believes that McCarthy’s comments defuse the scandal that has sapped the public of their trust in the former secretary of state. If that’s true, it should terrify Democrats who are invested in a Clinton victory in 2016. Clinton’s troubles are not of Republicans making but her own.
It will be fascinating to see if Democratic candidates seeking the presidency will note that Clinton’s viability as a Democratic candidate in the general election has been substantially damaged by the investigation into her conduct.
Of all of Clinton’s would-be rivals, only O’Malley has attempted to leverage Clinton’s email conduct to advance his political prospects. But a candidate like O’Malley who is barely registering in the polls will face substantial pressure to avoid lending credence to what Clinton operatives and Democrats broadly have characterized as the partisan fixation of addlepated conservatives. If those pressures win out, and Democrats decline to thoroughly litigate both the Clinton Foundation’s unethical foreign donations and Clinton’s emails, it will underscore the extent to which the former secretary of state defines the terms of the internal Democratic debate and the uphill battle her challengers face.
It would not be to Clinton’s benefit, however, if her opponents decline to debate fully her liabilities as a candidate. Their deference would signal Clinton’s dominance and their concerns for their careers when, not if, she becomes the party’s nominee. Republicans, however, will not be so accommodating in the general election.
