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Clinton's Compulsive Speechifying

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- Again with the speeches. The gross excessiveness of it all, vacuuming up six-figure checks well past the point of rational need or political seemliness. The ceaseless drip of information that ought to have already been released, now being presented with a self-serving back pat over transparency.

I wasn't planning to write, again, about Hillary Clinton's compulsive speechifying. I already weighed in nearly a year ago urging her to stop talking. For money, that is.

That unheeded advice came, by my accounting, some $6 million ago. Not including Bill Clinton's speeches. Not including any speeches that Hillary Clinton made on behalf of the family foundation, which just disclosed that, um, it neglected to disclose somewhere between $12 million and $26 million of money it made by booking the Clintons.

Because, the foundation explained, this money counted as "revenue," not "donations," and therefore was not reported. Their reporting pledge only covered donations. (Credit here for continuing the reporting after she left State Department.)

Let me repeat: I am a fan of Hillary Clinton's. But here I find myself, once again, with hair on fire, so let me explain why I find this conduct so disturbing.

It is, granted, a little late to bemoan the spectacle of former presidents, or former anything elses, taking to the lecture circuit to cash in.

 

When Ronald Reagan, fresh from the White House, pocketed $2 million in speaking fees from a Japanese company, New York Times columnist William Safire sputtered.

"There is such a thing as seemliness, decorum, respect for high office," he wrote. "If this foreign revolving-door ripoff is right, then what would be wrong with a Return Address at Bitburg, for a million marks, or the dedication of the Gorbachev Glasnost Center, for a million rubles? For a former president with a hot agent and no sense of sleaze, the profit opportunities are endless."

Hmmm.

What once screamed sleaze now is considered post-presidential business as usual. On leaving the White House, George W. Bush said he planned to "replenish the 'ol coffers" with speaking fees. Peter Stone of the Center for Public Integrity calculated in a 2011 article that Bush had raked in about $15 million, "following in the golden path blazed by his predecessor, Bill Clinton." Bush 43 cited the now quaint fees -- $50,000, $75,000 -- his dad commanded.

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