In the circles where I run, one theme that keeps coming back is the idea that even if Hillary Clinton doesn’t really have more governing experience than Barack Obama, she does have more experience being attacked by Republicans. In that sense, she’s “tested,” we know what dirt there is. With Obama, by contrast, who knows? There’s obviously something to that, but there’s sort of less to it than a lot of people think. Amidst the media’s self-abasing desire to show they can be hard on Barack Obama, they’ve managed not to remark on the Clintons’ refusal to release their tax reforms. Or to disclose the donors to the Clinton Foundation.
The Obama campaign and Obama supporters have tended to play this kind of thing with kid gloves since nobody wants to ape the right-wing smear machine that tormented the Clintons during the 1990s. Still, the right-wing smear machine in question certainly isn’t going to be that discrete. And they evidently think these kind of disclosures would be damaging. I mean, the candidate of economic populism and national security has a husband whose running around the world raising huge sums of cash from corporate titans and foreign dictators? Similarly, I think another run-through of the Marc Rich pardon isn’t going to reflect well on anyone.