Hillary Clinton and the age of "extreme carelessness"

I don't know about you, but I still remember the day that the Monica Lewinsky story broke...January 21, 1998. I'd been the Daily News' political writer for only about six months; I actually was at a gym exercising (tells you how long ago this was!) when CNN, on the wall of TVs, started reporting this odd tale of a White House intern (boosted by something I'd never heard of until that very moment...called the Drudge Report). I raced back to my editors, and actually wasted much of the afternoon working to successfully convince them this was our Page 1 story. The front page headline they ultimately went with was remarkably prescient: "CAN HE SURVIVE?"

Because here was the thing about a Bill Clinton sex scandal. It's not that most folks thought that a presidential affair in the Oval Office was a crime, or even (heh) an impeachable offense, and God knows this wasn't the first cad in the White House, as about 900 books on JFK will inform you. It's just that, we all remembered the 1992 campaign,when the revelations about Gennifer Flowers (remember her?) nearly wrecked Clinton's chance at the presidency. Even if the man was a sex addict, surely he'd keep it zipped for eight years as POTUS. Wouldn't he? Anything less wouldn't just be careless. It would be "extremely careless."

Bill Clinton escaped, barely.  A majority of Americans saw his impeachment as a blatantly political act, and were remarkably willing to forgive his public dishonesty in telling the world "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." No modern president -- not even Ronald Reagan -- was so popular upon leaving the White House. Still, you think there would have been a time of reckoning in the Clinton household. That folks who believe in "a vast right-wing conspiracy" (which pretty much exists...along with a much less effective one on the left) would know that their every future political move would be watched by people ready to pounce.

And yet here we are again in the unending video loop of modern American history. Here's a top law enforcement officer -- FBI director James Comey -- telling America that Hillary Clinton didn't break the law as she created a private email server which allowed her to delete some emails that should be part of the public record and also meant that classified stuff was now vulnerable to hackers. Not illegal, but disingenuous enough for Comey to issue what you'd call a political indictment.

"Extremely careless."

Again.

I agree with James Comey on both counts. I've believed since the outset of the affair that, baring any new disclosures, Hillary Clinton did not commit a crime. (Although someone needs to explain, then, why these other folks did...) I also fully agree that her actions were "extremely careless"...reckless even.

But here's where you have to wonder. Clinton was also "extremely careless" in giving a string of big-money speeches to big banks, Wall Street firms (like Goldman Sachs), and corporations that will have issues before the next POTUS. She was also "extremely careless" in dealing with counties and corporations that had business before the U.S. State Department and were making huge gifts to her family's Clinton Foundation at the same time.  Extremely careless...or maybe just arrogant. The arrogance of our times and our elite classes, who think they can get away with just about anything -- and then write it off as "extremely careless."

After all, it's definitely arrogant -- and not careless at all -- when Clinton and her campaign think that it's OK to go seven months, in the heat of the most fractured and chaotic presidential election in nearly a half-century, without answering reporters' questions at a news conference. It was certainly arrogant not to release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches.

But that's the world that Bill and Hillary Clinton live in ever since their success in politics made them members of our 1 Percent elite, a world of entitlement where your kid's in line for a $600,000 journalism job when she's not even a journalist, where $225,000 for a 40-minute speech doesn't seem obscene if "that's what they offered" and where accountability is increasingly a 4-letter word. In 2016, millions of voters are catching onto this, but...

Hillary Clinton is extremely careless, arrogant...and very, very lucky. The 4th most unpopular nominee in modern times (Nos. 2 and 3, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater, lost in 20-point blowouts) is running against No. 1 in Donald Trump. It would be easy to say that Trump and his minions are also guilty of being "extremely careless" when they do things like tweet memes from anti-Semitic websites. But that's not carelessness, either; rather, it's a blatant appeal to racism and to voters' worst instincts, and it will surely fail. Today's damning word cloud from the FBI's Comey will hang over Hillary Clinton's head until November...and follow her into the Oval Office.

And then, finally, after everything she's been through to become America's 45th president, Hillary Clinton surely wouldn't do anything else "extremely careless."

Would she?