An evening with the money-grabbing Clintons
Only a heckler can improve an evening with the money-grabbing Clintons
By Maureen Callahan April 12, 2019
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Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton during "An Evening With The Clintons" at the Beacon Theatre
Now that they’ve been dismissed, defanged and declawed by their own party, Bill and Hillary Clinton are doing what comes naturally: Hitting people up for money.
Thursday night marked the kickoff, in New York City, of their national speaking tour. Billed as “a one-of-a-kind conversation with two individuals who have helped shape our world … [and who offer] remarkable insight into where we go from here,” the event simply underscored why Hillary lost: Over-promise, under-deliver, avoid accountability, and expect the masses to nonetheless be satisfied.
My ticket, a third-row seat in the balcony, cost $210. This bought me 90 minutes of longtime Clinton lackey Paul Begala launching such softballs as:
Is the two-state solution dead?
What is happening to American politics?
How did it feel to watch the bin Laden raid?
Why are the Dems losing rural voters?
How did you raise such an amazing daughter?
I wish I were exaggerating. The only current event touched upon was that day’s arrest of Julian Assange — astonishing given the surfeit of recent headlines really worth discussing: Jussie Smollett, race relations and hate crimes; the one-percenters caught up in the college admissions scandal; the push to federally legalize marijuana and reform the criminal justice system; the role of Silicon Valley in curbing, if not eliminating, foreign governments hacking our elections [ahem]; Elizabeth Warren’s call to break up Amazon, Google and Facebook — to say nothing of the 20 or so declared Dem candidates for president.
Oh, and #MeToo. Not a mention of how that little movement has changed things, potentially for a one-time frontrunner. But as we know, that, to the Clintons, is a third rail.
Coverage of this snoozefest was typically respectful and anodyne, yet the most exciting moment of the night made little if any news. Not quite halfway through the event, a man in the front row stood up and interrupted.
“Bill, this is boring!” he yelled. As he tried asking his question — “Why don’t you talk about — ” Hillary immediately began talking over him, saying that the “important political conversations” they were trying to have could be difficult, especially when interrupted by such “agent provocateurs.”
“Jeffrey Epstein!” shouted the man.
Oh, the irony.
The heckler was, of course, swiftly hauled away, and the conversation returned to Bill talking about the good old days when he was president, telling such surely apocryphal tales as bringing together two veterans, each missing one leg, and a “formidable” overweight black lesbian activist — the veterans later telling Bill, with tears in their eyes, that they had more in common with this woman than they ever would have thought.
Such was the subtlety of the Clintons’ subtext: Without ever mentioning Trump by name, they touted themselves as forever devoted to bringing people together (no mention of “deplorables”), of trying to salvage rural economies (how about visiting while running for president?), of being loyal even to those staffers who quit over policy they didn’t agree with (alas, no words for the Clinton allies who went into substantial legal debt, or to prison as Susan McDougal did, over the myriad scandals that plagued Bill’s presidency).
The old Bill, however, still peeks out. In response to Begala’s most toothless question — which TV show most resembles politics, “The West Wing” or “Veep” — Hillary said “Game of Thrones.”
Bill said, “I was thinking about the bright young Irish actress on ‘Schitt’s Creek.’ ”
Ha!
The greatest irony was the couple sitting on stage, in a tastefully bland setting reminiscent of an upscale doctor’s waiting room, lamenting the widening divide between the two Americas while seated before a rapt audience of the converted — changing no minds, taking no questions from the crowd, brooking no chance that their narrative would be challenged, happy to keep looking in the rearview mirror while wondering what might have been.
Their motives are unclear, but it’s likely as much about easy money as it is ego gratification. The Big Dog and the sure-thing-first-female president are no longer needed, on the stump or behind the scenes, so what better way to recreate the campaign experience? At the end of the night, the Clintons acted as though it were another convention speech, shaking hands with adoring front-row fans while “You Make My Dreams Come True” by Hall & Oates — a recurring tune Hillary used on the 2016 campaign trail — played over the sound system.
So: Who is making whose dreams reality? What about the possibility that Hillary, incredibly, still thinks she has a shot at 2020? Perhaps she’s hoping the so-called circular firing squad takes out every and any front-runner. Despite her recent declaration that she won’t be running for president again, as we well know — you can never trust a Clinton. She still thinks the election was stolen from her.
And so they plod on, for fun, profit and maybe more, refusing to literally cede the stage as today’s Democratic party tries to leave the Clintons where they belong: firmly in the past.
https://nypost.com/2019/04/12/only-a...bing-clintons/
