The Fall of the House of Clinton
How a political dynasty lost its way.
by
Todd S. Purdum
November 11, 2016 10:30 am
ith the exception of 2014, when Hillary Clinton was already plotting her second presidential campaign, at least one of the Clintons, Bill or Hillary, has been on a ballot or in public office on every November Election Day since 1974. Twenty-one elections, over 42 years, one of the longest dynastic runs in American politics.
Last Tuesday, the voters decided that the man from Hope, and the woman from Park Ridge, Fayetteville, Little Rock, and Chappaqua who followed him, had stayed too long at the fair. At ages 69 and 70, it’s a safe bet that neither will ever again stand for elective office, or at the center of the national stage. So it’s worth pausing to ponder the meaning of the fall of the house of Clinton for the country they jointly served, inspired, and bedeviled for so long.
More precisely, it’s worth asking how a family name that once personified skill, adroitness, empathy, and effectiveness—and, yes, slipperiness and a legalistic tendency toward evasiveness—in modern politics came to embody the opposite of all the good qualities while amplifying and exaggerating the bad ones. What did he have that she (and they) lost track of? The short answer: a lot.
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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/the-fall-of-the-house-of-clinton
