'Clinton Cash' Campaign Scandal: 'How Could This Have Happened?'

From Megan McArdle, who is increasingly becoming one of the more perceptive analysts around.

At Bloomberg, "What the Clintons Haven't Learned":

Tuesday will be the unveiling of what can be breathlessly awaited only in campaign season: a book on the Clinton Foundation, and allegations of a torrent of sleazy foreign cash that has poured into its coffers. I'm already on record as saying that the author, Peter Schweizer, might struggle to meet the burden of proof to show that the Clintons absolutely and unquestionably did something wrong. On the other hand, there's a lower burden of proof for "raises unsettling questions that will dog Hillary Clinton through a tough campaign," and that may already have been met.

The great mystery that remains is how this could have happened. The Clintons have known for a long while that Hillary would be running in 2016. And they ought to have known that accepting foreign donations, from folks who wanted things from the State Department, would become a problem for her candidacy. They certainly should have been aware that funneling all of her State Department e-mails through a private server, and then destroying them, would create terrible optics for her campaign and fuel any subsequent scandals. Why, then, did two such tenacious, wily campaigners proceed with this nonsense?

It looks to me like the answer is that they somehow didn't know the things that they should have known. They certainly act surprised. The campaign machine that used to blast away at incipient scandals with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns now lets them fester for weeks before offering a lame response: Hillary's press conference about the e-mails gave critics more fodder, and Bill's non-response response to questions about foundation finances is even worse. The former president told NBC that he has to keep giving high-priced speeches all over the world because "I gotta pay our bills." Coming from a man reputed to be worth tens of millions, who gave his daughter a multi-million-dollar wedding, this seems a bit ... off.

Which makes me wonder if the famed Clinton campaign skills aren't a little bit out of date...

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