It was a different guy in each neighborhood, but there was always that guy. He would knock on our door, and offer to do odd jobs for money. Sometimes he would borrow money. Often he wouldn't do the work, and he'd offer some excuse. Whatever he told you, you simply knew you couldn't trust him — and everyone around him knew that he was up tosomething.
That guy nobody could trust and who always seemed to be running a scam — she is now a woman. And she's on the verge of becoming President of the United States.
Nobody trusts Hillary Clinton. Neither Republicans nor Democrats trust her. Her oldest friends and her closest allies don't trust her. And she has consistently earned that distrust by lying, changing her story, bending the rules, hiding her work, and stonewalling.
Only 11 percent of likely voters find her "honest and trustworthy," a NBC News poll found over the summer. Less than one in four Democrats were willing to use that label for her.
Even Donald Trump is more trustworthy than Clinton, voters told the Washington Post. In a recent Post poll Trump won on the trustworthiness question by a 12-point margin. Trump this fall has consistently won that question by double-digit margins.
Her closest confidantes don't trust her, hacked emails show. In September 2015, Hillary Clinton said at an Ohio campaign event. "You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center … I plead guilty."
Five days later, Neera Tanden, a honcho in the Clinton campaign, emailed campaign chairman John Podesta asking, "Why did she call herself a moderate?" Podesta replied, "I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn't remember saying it. Not sure I believe her."
If Hillary Clinton's campaign chief and longtime top-aide readily assumes she lied to him about something that small, you have to wonder if she feels any fealty to the truth in any circumstances.
We also know that she has no problem blatantly dodging disclosure laws. That's how she felt fine setting up her own email server—in order to keep the prying eyes of the State Department from cataloguing her public records and making them available for public records requests, as required by law.
Clinton was required by law to make sure the State Department had copies of her emails as she drafted and sent them. She didn't, and when she left office in 2013, she still hadn't. Only two years later, when hackers made her secret email address public, did she finally fess up.
Tanden, in a March 2015 email, asked Podesta in an email, "Why didn't they get this stuff out like 18 months ago?" Then she answered her own question: "[I] guess I know the answer[. T]hey wanted to get away with it."
She's always trying to get away with something. And she rarely admits any more than what has already been proven against her. This was demonstrated clearly in the email fracas.
Clinton said she used private email so she could use just one device. Later it was revealed she used multiple devices. She said she turned over all work-related emails. Later we learned she deleted many work-related emails without turning them over. She said what she did was permitted. It wasn't. And on and on.
Self-serving deception is her pattern. In 2008, she claimed she landed in Bosnia "under sniper fire." This was totally false.
There's no denying that Clinton regularly and blatantly misleads the public on material issues. It would be insane to expect that habit to change when she gets into the White House. The strongest possible defense of her is that her dishonesty problem isn't really a problem. Some liberals basically make this case: Hillary Clinton is well-intentioned, intelligent, and capable, so she doesn't owe the American people candor.
But this viewpoint isn't compatible with a liberal republican democracy. It's servile. It's the path to despotism.
Clinton's untrustworthiness would sink her, were she running against a normal candidate. Since she has a good chance of winning on Tuesday, America has a good chance of handing immense power over to a person we simply can't trust.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
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