Hillary: rich but caring, so she's o.k.

The Clintons' Country (as opposed to Georgetown) Home

Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter,  only just noticed the story now is Hillary, "not the guy in the White House.” But Noonan is now on it. In a column titled, “Hillary Clinton, for Richer or Poorer,” Noonan writes that Hillary came from:

a solidly suburban upper-middle-class home, glided into elite schools, became a lawyer, married a politician who quickly rose, enjoyed all the many perks of a governor's mansion and then the White House, and then all the perks of a senator, secretary of state and former first lady. She's been driven in limousines and official cars almost all her adult life. For more than a quarter-century she has seen America through tinted windows.

Newly out of the Ivy League, she asked for political power instead of financial power. Many of her generation of liberal activists, with similar bona fides, chose the latter. She married and became a politician and accrued great power and fame.

But she still wanted the money. Through speeches, appearances, books and investments, she got it. Bill seems happy with it. She sees a disjunction between her acquisitive streak and her party's demonization of acquisitive streaks, and so she claims she was broke, at the mercy of forces, an orphan in the storm, instead of an operator of considerable hunger and skill.

All this has made her look silly and phony. One wonders what she thinks of the base of her party that she can't knock it off.

Noonan does supply Hillary’s defense, though without sympathy:

When an interviewer compared her to Mitt Romney in terms of wealth, she got a stony look. That is a "false equivalency," she said. You could see she feels she should not be compared to a wealthy Republican because she's liberal and therefore stands for the little guy. So she can be rich and should not be criticized, while rich people who have the wrong policies—that would be Republicans—are "the rich" and can be scorned and shamed.