The fact that Hillary Clinton is the first female to win a major party’s presidential nomination should not obscure the harm she’s done to our politics in her decades-long career.

Arrogance, secrecy, mendacity, and implausible claims of victimhood will be her ultimate legacy. A tuned-in voter from 1993 would find today’s furrowed-brow columns about Clinton’s flaws strangely familiar. This presidential race is covered by political correspondents who don’t know what “Whitewater” was, but a long memory reveals a lot of recurring patterns in Hillary Clinton’s life.

Five days after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, he announced that his wife would be the architect of the administration’s health-care reform proposal, launching one of the most spectacular displays of hubris in modern political history. The pre-Clinton Democratic party was certainly liberal, but hadn’t quite yet fully embraced a philosophy of subjugating the private sector to the will of those running the state. The then–first lady legendarily dismissed businesses’ concerns about the costs her plan would impose. “I can’t be expected to go out and save every undercapitalized business in America,” she snorted.

Clinton blew off warnings from Democratic senators such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bill Bradley that her proposal was headed for disaster. When Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala told her the same thing privately, she told Shalala she “was just jealous that [she] wasn’t in charge and that was why [she] was complaining,” according to Shalala’s assistant secretary. If you’re full of contempt for people, it’s easy to lie to them. Hillary Clinton lied to the public from the first moment they saw her. Republican lawmakers found Clinton similarly intractable.

Today, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert is likely to be remembered for an infamous scandal. But in June 1993, he was a moderate Illinois Republican congressman thought to be open to the health-care proposal. But when Clinton met with a group of House Republicans for dinner at the Northern Virginia home of John Kasich, and Hastert made a pitch for health-savings accounts, she explained that HSAs couldn’t be part of the plan. “She said, ‘We can’t afford to have that money go to the private sector. That money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it,’”

Hastert later told David Brock, the one-time right-wing muckraker who later became the Clintons’ biggest apologist. “And so [I thought], ‘Holy mackerel. I can’t argue these issues, these are philosophical issues.’” It is unsurprising, then, that White House economists privately nicknamed Clinton’s health-care team “the Bolsheviks” — and not just for ideological reasons, either. A remarkably Stalinist paranoia and secrecy surrounded the health-care task force, one that foreshadowed the private, off-the-books e-mail server that would come to light a quarter-century later. One of Clinton’s first major fights was over whether the health-care task force had to open its hearings to the public; a federal judge found it was violating federal “sunshine” laws.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436392/hillary-clinton-legacy-lies-secrecy-arrogance-victimhood