Down And Out In Chappaqua

image via Ricochet

Dick Morris

Hillary Clinton likes to present herself as an everywoman, facing the same challenges that bedevil all families, living in sync with their trials and tribulations, overcoming adversity as we all try to do. The latest iteration of her wish to downplay her wealth so as to be just plain folks was her bald assertions to Diane Sawyer that she and Bill were “dead broke” and “in debt” when she left the White House, struggling to “you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, Chelsea’s education, you know, it was not easy.”

Consider this:

* Her joint tax return with Bill for 2001 showed a $16,165,110.00 income for her first year out of the White House.

* Even before they left the White House, their joint income for 2000 was $359,000, scarcely in the “dead broke” category, particularly when you consider that the Clintons had none of the normal expenses that the rest of us do. Housing, cars, child care, insurance, electricity, landscaping, health care, these are all covered by the taxpayers. All they had to pay for was dry cleaning, food and college tuition for Chelsea. Most people could make that work.

* She signed a book contract with an $8 million advance in the closing weeks of Bill’s presidency, and Bill inked a $15 million deal at about the same time. She got over $2 million of this in 2001. Is that dead broke?

* The Clintons bought a house in September of 1999 in Chappaqua for $1.7 million.

* In December of 2000, they also purchased a $2.85 million house in Washington, D.C., before Bill left office. Do people who are dead broke and in debt do this?

* Chelsea, had graduated from college by the end of Bill’s term and her tuition for graduate work at Oxford for the year 2001 could not have been too burdensome for a family that would earn $16 million that year.

So why does she do this? Why make up stories of poverty when they were verifiable multi-millionaires? Does her need to misrepresent her circumstances on the public stage bespeak a fundamental disregard for the truth and a confidence that she can manipulate our feelings as surely as any soap opera actress?

Hillary has always felt the need to adjust the truth of her extraordinary circumstances — up or down — to suit her political needs of the moment.