Stumble of the Week

Only 19 months until Election Day, and already the candidates are stumbling wildly. This week, in two breathless paragraphs in Time, Rand Paul praised the Koch Brothers who, “unlike many crony capitalists who troll the halls of Congress looking for favors, . . . have consistently lobbied against special-interest politics.” Clearly gratified by such public genuflection, David Koch looked ahead to “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” a pride of place the Wisconsin governor kept for about a day – until he appeared to oppose legal immigration for depressing the wages of working people, something to which the brothers are not averse. And then there was the Byzantine story of the Clinton Foundation raking in not-always-reported donations from foreign billionaires who developed uranium mines in Canada and then sold their company to the Russians, all while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Somewhere in the midst of this, a Russian investment bank involved in the uranium deal paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow – all of which may be perfectly legal by some letter of the law, but it seems a twisted tale in need of explanation from a presidential candidate. It is said that when Harry Truman retired from the presidency in 1953, he and Bess got in their old car and drove themselves back to Independence, Missouri, where they lived in the house they had owned all their married lives on Harry’s army pension from World War I. That seems a long time ago.