My point in saying the above is that Mrs. Clinton is not just intelligent but relatively competent, and--at least now--more than experienced enough to be President. But the question of her judgment has been raised before, for instance by President Obama when he ran against her in 2008, and indeed it was raised successfully (inasmuch as she lost that election). I think that's no coincidence. In other words, Mrs. Clinton has routinely shown bad judgment even if she has not, as her many risible detractors on the Right claim, acted contrary to the law. Whatever one thinks of the several scandals that engulfed the Clintons in Arkansas and later in the White House, I think there should be a general consensus that in a number of them, both she and her husband exercised poor judgment.
I think, moreover, that it was poor judgment--up to gall--to be an Illinois native and longstanding resident of Arkansas who somehow felt, just months after moving there, that she had a right, as an obvious carpetbagger, to be a Senator from New York. I think she exercised poor judgment throughout the 2008 presidential election, as did her husband. I think her decision to use a private email server in the fashion she did--that is, with minimal transparency about doing so--was a lapse in judgment, as was her advice to President Obama with respect to Libya. I think she did the best she could do with respect to the whole Benghazi affair, but declaring her blameless of any malfeasance, which I certainly do, is not the same as saying her judgment was above reproach in that instance either.
So her lack of judgment in earning millions of dollars speaking to the very worst actors in our economy at a time when that economy was being run into the ground by the very people she was speaking to was not just noteworthy but, in fact, part of a decades-long trend.
Mrs. Clinton, I mean to say, is not just intelligent, largely competent, and certainly experienced enough to be President, she is also someone prone to shocking lapses in judgment and, worse, an inability to see those lapses in retrospect. As a voter, that makes me uncomfortable, and it would make me uncomfortable even if it turned out (despite Mrs. Clinton's own actions suggesting otherwise) that there was nothing objectionable in those speeches. What would remain objectionable to me would be her judgment in giving them when she did, to whom she did, and for the sums she did, and then attempting to hide them from the public thereafter.
I think for so many years we Democrats have been saying--quite correctly--that the Clintons are unfairly hunted by the Right that we have failed to question whether either of them, for all their smarts, is very regularly wise in their personal dealings or handling of public scrutiny. I know Mr. Clinton is not, and I have come to conclude Mrs. Clinton is not either--which is especially worrying considering that she and her husband employ a massive team of handlers whose very job it is to steer them straight.
So, with respect to the Goldman Sachs speeches, either Mrs. Clinton's hiring all the wrong people--which, given the Mooks and Brocks that now surround her, I suspect is true; for some reason, she does seem to be surrounded by nasty, brutish, cynical people--or she's not listening to the advice her advisers are giving her, which, given her recalcitrance as to the email and Goldman Sachs issues, may be equally correct.
Neither of those possibilities reflects well on her as a presidential candidate.
JB: You cite a number of anonymous sources who were present at the Goldman-Sachs talk Hillary gave. What can you tell us about these sources and are any of them likely to come forward and own their statements? And does that matter?
SA: While we know from Buzzfeed, Politico, and The Wall Street Journal that Mrs. Clinton owns the right to her speeches, we don't know the terms on which she secured those rights. So perhaps these Goldman Sachs employees speaking to the foregoing media outlets are doing so under cover of anonymity because they fear legal liability for revealing what Mrs. Clinton said to them in private. In other words, perhaps they are, in fact, violating express agreements they voluntarily signed.
But I doubt that.
I doubt it because Bob Kerrey, whose words are the most damning ones contained in my article, is a Clinton surrogate who does not claim to have been at the speeches--which would cover him under any non-disclosure agreement reached with respect thereto--but rather someone who simply knows the content of what was said by other means.
So it's worth noting that, in fact, the most damning source I cite in my article is not an anonymous one.
As for the anonymous sources, it seems to me that none of them speak as though they're violating a trust or a contract. What's most odious about their accounts, actually, is that they seem to think that they're helping or at a minimum complimenting Mrs. Clinton by revealing that she is fantastically "gushy" toward the financial services sector. That their institution's likely criminal behavior drove the nation to the brink of a Depression seems to shame neither them nor Mrs. Clinton. So in fact I'd almost feel more comfortable if they were being sheepish or canny in reporting back what Clinton said to them behind closed doors; rather, it seems that their cluelessness about how outrageously inappropriate Clinton's words were is matched only by Mrs. Clinton's own obliviousness on the matter.
What we know is that these sources spoke to--as I note (and link to) in my article--some of the most revered media organizations in the nation. We have no reason whatsoever to doubt their stories, only to continue to be amazed at both their shamelessness and Mrs. Clinton's audacity. And as I indicated in the article, the audacity I speak of here is not merely for having given the speeches and then tried to keep them from voters, but for having done so little as a Senator to protect the nation from these Wall Street predators and also for pretending, now, that her views on greed-driven free-market predation are in any sense in step with the base of the Democratic Party.
JB: Thanks for talking with me again, Seth. You've given us a lot to think about, especially right before the New York primary on Tuesday.
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