There’s a debate going on about Hillary Clinton’s past. If she runs for president in 2016, should Republicans reach back to the scandals of her years as first lady? Or should they focus on more recent times, especially her tenure as secretary of state, to build a case against her?
The GOP doesn’t have to choose. Of course Clinton’s recent experiences are relevant to a presidential run. But so are her actions in the ‘90s, the ‘80s and even the ‘70s. It’s not ancient history; it reveals something about who Clinton was and still is. And re-examining her past is entirely consistent with practices in recent campaigns.
That’s especially true because there will be millions of young voters in 2016 who know little about the Clinton White House. Americans who had not even been born when Bill Clinton first took the oath of office in 1993 will be eligible to vote two years from now. They need to know that Hillary Clinton has been more than secretary of state.
Those voters need to know, for starters, that Mrs. Clinton once displayed incredible investment skills. In 1978 and 1979, when her husband was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, she enlisted the help of a well-connected crony to invest $1,000 in the highly volatile and risky cattle futures market. Several months later, she walked away with $100,000 — a nearly 10,000 percent profit. Cynics thought the well-connected crony who executed the trades might have paid her the profits from good trades and absorbed the losses from bad ones, but Mrs. Clinton insisted that she developed her investing acumen by reading The Wall Street Journal.
New voters also need to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s checkered history as a lawyer and the game of hide-and-seek she played with federal prosecutors who subpoenaed her old billing records as part of the Whitewater investigation. After two years of defying subpoenas and not producing the records, she suddenly claimed that they had been in a closet in the White House residence all along.
Finally, there is the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has somewhat clumsily brought into the political discussion. In 1998 and 1999, Mrs. Clinton essentially played two roles, that of wronged wife and that of strategist and spokeswoman in a concerted White House attack-the-prosecutor misdirection campaign.
Even in a national contest, a focus on Mrs. Clinton’s past likely won’t decide the outcome any more than Romney’s time at Bain Capital decided the 2012 race. But it will help define Mrs. Clinton for millions of voters who weren’t around or weren’t paying attention in the 1990s. They need to know. And that’s what campaigns are for.
Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.