Hillary inching ever closer to the power she has sought relentlessly.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, a decaying painting is locked away to decay in its attic mausoleum as a symbol of a beautiful boy’s tarnished soul. By way of contrast, the embodiment of America’s ruling class now lives and breathes in the public persona of one person, Hillary Clinton.
Compromise after compromise of principles is made for the sake of power. After years of toiling in the halls of power, the presidency finally seems hers for the taking. Yet, the closer Hillary comes to assuming the presidential chair, the closer Americans examine her public pose only to recoil.
Many Americans agree there is something about the shadow and shade of Hillary’s portrait that leaves more questions than answers, a “touch of cruelty” seeping through the cracks in her carefully crafted façade.
In a word, many Americans find her “mendacious,” and the revelations regarding the appearance of the Clinton State Department’s “pay-to-play” scheme – delivering special access and favors to Clinton Foundation donors – is only the latest episode in a long series of scandals besmirching her trustworthiness.
The revelations – and there are more to come and they will never end – is shocking and not shocking. If you think government is good, clean, and constantly striving for the public good, seeing all this up close must be startling. Most thinking people long ago let go of their naïveté about government and therefore find nothing particularly surprising about any of this.
Is this appearance of impropriety just in the eyes of her beholders? Are Americans simply projecting their worst fears about their politics onto her as the Clintons and their supporters would have us believe? Or is there something truly nefarious lurking beneath the surface?
I venture the answer is a bit of both.
The Bargain
Hillary Clinton strikes me at once as a Faustian figure, but rather than making a deal with the devil for eternal youth or unlimited knowledge, she has asked for state power.
Spurred by her idealism to serve the poor and underprivileged, this victim of her own privilege has engaged in a bargain time immemorial: give me the power of the state to kill and steal and coerce other people with impunity, and I will use this power to bring social justice to the land. Like most before her who have made this pact, the promise of power consumes and corrupts her noble goals.
Where power may begin as simply a means to achieve one’s dreams, winning and wielding power ultimately becomes the dream itself. Compromise after compromise of principles is made for the sake of power. Sacrifice after sacrifice of others is offered for the sake of power. Lie after lie is told for the sake of keeping the truth of power-hungry dreams alive. One’s ideals become hollow pretense, mere words, and the curse of power takes hold, i.e. for every good deed done, two or three “necessary” evils must be committed.
Such appears to be the tragic tale of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Radical Turned Establishment Figure
In 1969, Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis, titled “There Is Only the Fight,” on the work of that now infamous radical, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky seems to have played the same role for young Hillary Rodham that Lord Henry Wotton played for young Dorian Gray – the enchanting snake in the Garden of Eden. At the beginning of his own book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky quotes himself:
Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.
That said, Hillary diverges with her role model Alinsky in her thesis on one crucial point. Rather than rebelling against the establishment to win her own kingdom, she would become the establishment. Mark Leibovich provides a telling summary of this schism in his 2007 piece for The New York Times:
