The once-beleaguered candidate looks like a frontrunner again.
If in January 2017, Hillary Clinton is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, historians may well point to this month as the moment her campaign turned around. Like the first brisk snap of fall, Clinton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer has morphed overnight into the best week of her campaign: Joe Biden is out, her poll numbers are up, her crisp debate performance reassured nervous Democrats and her measured resolution before the House Benghazi committee made her interrogators (of both parties) seem small by comparison.
Meanwhile, with every passing week, the GOP looks less united, more angry and less able to govern.
But if Clinton has benefited from an undeniable run of good luck, in a larger sense, there is nothing sudden or surprising about where she finds herself today. Her reconsolidated status as the prohibitive 2016 Democratic front-runner is the predictable result of the grim determination that has always been her hallmark—and the penchant for overreaching that has long been her enemies’ Achilles' heel.
“She’s had the kind of couple of weeks that you pray for in presidential politics,” says Bob Shrum, the veteran Democratic consultant who has not shrunk in recent months from noting Clinton’s political vulnerabilities.
When they originally scheduled Thursday’s hearing, House Republicans had hoped to turn the Benghazi investigation into a Soviet show trial, knocking Clinton further down after a summer that’s seen her consistently playing defense. But by the time she actually sat down on Capitol Hill Thursday, Clinton didn’t have to make any real effort to paint the Benghazi inquiry as partisan. In all-too-honest statements, Republicans from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy on down had already done that for her—and it was left largely to the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, to attack the motives of the Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, while Clinton pleaded for statesmanship and a bipartisan approach to diplomacy in a dangerous world.
“She’s very fortunate the committee did not grant her request to let her do this earlier,” Shrum says. “The Republicans always overplay their hand, especially when it comes to the Clintons—and they’re doing it again.”
As committee members of both parties read staff-prepared questions and talking points, Clinton sat alone, and mostly without notes, at one point offering a riveting moment-by-moment account of the desperate efforts to save Ambassador Christopher Stevens in the State Department compound in Libya. In hours of even-tempered testimony, the contrast with her adversaries was striking. “I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together,” she told the panel, explaining her anguish at the loss of four American lives in the 2012 attacks. The lines in her sober and evidently careworn face seemed proof enough of the claim.
After Thursday, the Benghazi affair looks less like a potential government cover-up and more like yet another easy-to-dismiss investigation into the Clintons’ lives, a script many Americans remember all too well from the 1990s. “My question is not will Benghazi rise to the level of Whitewater,” says the longtime Clinton family adviser Paul Begala. “It won’t because there’s no independent counsel, no Ken Starr with an unlimited budget and an unnatural curiosity about Bill Clinton’s sex life. Rather, will the Benghazi investigation rise to the level of the Clinton Christmas card investigation? You will recall that the GOP Congress logged 140 hours of testimony and called 34 witnesses while investigating President Clinton’s Christmas card list. Mr. Gowdy’s investigation looks even less fair.”
More: Hillary’s Best Week Yet
Hillary is back on top! I used to think that Bill was the true master of performing under partisan pressure - but I now believe that Hillary may be even better. Wow, what a team!
