US election: Clinton campaign has been rocked to the foundations

A week out from the election, the shape of the next White House administration is clear.

The 45th presidency will be dogged by muckraking, the incumbent will be morally irredeemable in the eyes of half the nation and the most she or he can hope to achieve is to survive without ­impeachment.

This much was inevitable from the moment Hillary Clinton’s camp decided to contest the election on the single issue of virtue. Even if your name is Mother Teresa it is a dangerous tactic.

If you are a Clinton, it’s positively suicidal.

The reopened FBI inquiry into her alleged careless handling of classified material and attempted cover-up left her friends sounding desperate.

“We don’t know what these emails are, where they came from,” commentator Josh Barro told a National Public Radio panel on Friday. “But however bad this is, it’s not as bad as what Donald Trump has done and might do.”

Innocent until proven blameless is, then, the verdict of the sophisticates. Hillary might have made mistakes but Trump — “this obviously unacceptable person”, to use Barro’s words — would clearly be worse.

Many millions of dollars have been invested in trying to put a Clinton back in the White House; most of that has been spent carrying out a hit job on Trump. The conservative media has responded in kind; Rush Limbaugh has been routinely calling Clinton “Crooked Hillary” since the start of the year. Now it’s just “Crooked” or “the Witch with the capital ‘B’ ”.

The 2016 presidential race is less a battle of ideas than a brutal struggle for moral capital. It is an exercise in narcissism with two candidates fighting on the same platform; I am a paragon of virtue and my opponent is an unprincipled scoundrel.

That Clinton’s supporters now fear she may come second, despite Trump’s volatility, his verbal indiscretions, a sympathetic media and bucketloads of cash, is a measure of the seriousness of the charges against her. The lead in her boots is the Clinton Foundation and its web of associated entities, Bill Clinton’s legacy project to which a range of dubious characters and some governments — including ours incredibly — contributed, allegedly in pursuit of favours.

The Clintons’ ever-shrinking defence — that there is no evidence that indulgences were granted — sits uneasily with the facts. The more we learn about the foundation, the more it reminds us of the late-medieval abuses of Papal indulgences.

A billion dollars has been handed over on a nod and a wink; a speaking fee of half a million dollars is not a fair wage, it’s a bribe. Who knows how much was spent on charitable works (transparency is not the foundation’s strong point) but we do know the Clintons effortlessly went from being broke to being worth $US55 million, conservatively estimated, in double quick time. Forgive us for asking if it isn’t all a little shonky.

Had the Clintons or their representatives put the hard word on an Australian prime minister for a donation one hopes they would have been rebuffed, preferably as impolitely as possible. We wouldn’t do this for an African despot (would we?) so why should we do it for a former president and his wife, a former secretary of state and possible future president?

Who knows what moral pressure was put on Julia Gillard that led her to pledge $10.3m to the Clinton Foundation in 2013, or who signed off on the $88m paid to the foundation and its sister organisation, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, on our behalf between 2006 and 2014. Improving access to health in Asia may or may not be a worthy investment of Australian foreign aid, but why outsource the work to a private American organisation?

Whether Gillard thought she was buying influence when she donated $292m of our money to the Global Partnership for Education, which partners with the Clinton Foundation, only she can say. The facts are that she was appointed as chair of GPE after leaving office, has appeared at GPE events with Hillary Clinton and in at least two of her campaign ­videos.

What the Australian taxpayer gets out of this is anybody’s guess. The ear of a potential future American president? We kind of expected that anyway.

What we didn’t expect is that Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta would be up to his neck in a sinister campaign to undermine investment in Australia’s largest coal project, the future of which now hangs in the balance. The Australian’s coverage of this scandal, revealed in a leaked batch of Podesta’s emails, is astonishing. Less astonishing, and sadly predictable, is the indifference shown to the story by the Manus Broadcasting Corporation, formerly known as the ABC.

Nor is it any surprise that the MBC’s coverage of Clinton’s misdemeanours has been — shall we say — muted. It may be a story about other people’s politics, but every progressive thinker on the planet has skin in this game.

Trump’s candidacy, like Brexit, is a challenge to the cultural status quo that has prevailed for at least a generation. It is an affront to the inward and invisible grace of the educated, urban, technocratic class that dominates positions of cultural leadership from Massachusetts to Melbourne. Trump and his locker talk defies a code of behaviour — political correctness — that maintains their monopoly on truth.

Even if Trump loses, the troubling question for the East Coast cultural cabal is why at least four out of 10 Americans stuck with this deplorable character until the bitter end. The battle will continue.

If there is any comfort in this, it is in the beauty of America, a nation institutionally resistant to tyranny with multiple devices for self correction, notably its noisy democracy, the subject of Alexis de Tocqueville’s reassuring 1840 study.

“Those entrusted with the ­direction of public affairs in the United States are frequently inferior, in both capacity and morality,” he wrote. “They may frequently be faithless and frequently mistaken, but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct hostile to the majority; and they cannot give a dangerous or exclusive tendency to the government.”

Let’s hope not.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.