Is Hillary Clinton "Honest"?

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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has offered a curious defense of Hillary Clinton's "honesty," refuting the public's widespread view that she is a liar by narrowly defining what it means to be "honest" and arguing that she is less dishonest than she is a calculating and corner-cutting politician.

Kristof writes, "as we head toward the general election showdown, by all means denounce Hillary Clinton's judgment and policy positions, but let's focus on the real issues. She's not a saint but a politician, and to me this notion that she's fundamentally dishonest is a bogus narrative."

Kristof cites, for instance, that half of her campaign statements, as evaluated by PolitiFact, were rated either true or mostly true, comparable to how the group assessed statements by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Ted Cruz and much better than Donald Trump's 22 percent. Leaving aside the "conventional wisdom" bias of this mainstream media organization, Kristof does seem to have a point. In a narrow definition of "honesty," former Secretary of State Clinton may be "truthful" or kind of truthful half the time.

But Kristof misses the larger point that the American people are making when 56 percent of them rate her negatively and many call "crooked" and "dishonest." They seem to be commenting on her lack of authenticity and perhaps her resistance to sincerely acknowledging major errors in judgment. She only grudgingly apologized for her pro-Iraq War vote and still insists that her bloody "regime change" scheme for Libya was a good idea, even as the once-prosperous North African nation slides into anarchy and deprivation -- with the chief beneficiary the head-choppers of the Islamic State.

A Nixonian Quality

Many Americans sense that there is a Nixonian quality to Hillary Clinton -- her excessive secrecy, her defensiveness, her rigidity, her unwillingness to acknowledge or learn from mistakes. Even when she is forced into admitting a "mistake," such as her violation of State Department rules when she maintained a private email server for official correspondence, she acts as if she's just "apologizing" to close off further debate or examination. As with Richard Nixon, there's a feeling that Clinton's apologies and rationales are self-serving, not forthcoming.

Yet, while it's true that Nixon was a deceitful character -- his most famous lie being when he declared "I am not a crook" -- I would argue that he had some clear advantages over Clinton as President. He was a much more strategic thinker than she is -- and sometimes went against the grain of expectations as encapsulated in the phrase "Nixon goes to China," meaning that Nixon could open up to communist China precisely because he was viewed as such a hardliner who would never do such a thing but who finally judged that the move was in America's interests.

While it's impossible to say whether Clinton would seize unexpected openings as President, she showed none of that creativity, subtlety and courage as Secretary of State. She marched down a straightforward neocon line, doing precisely what Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted in the Middle East.

Clinton tried to sabotage President Barack Obama's diplomatic outreach to Iran and favored military solutions to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. She also followed a rightist approach in backing the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted an elected progressive president who had offended some of the Honduran oligarchs and outside corporate interests.

Lack of Self-Criticism

In addition, Clinton appears to have learned nothing from her support for the catastrophic Iraq War and has argued against "conflating" her Iraq decision with her Libya decision. But that suggests that she is incapable of learning a lesson from one mistake and applying it to a similar situation, an almost disqualifying characteristic for someone who hopes to become President.

Being a successful President requires extracting painful lessons from one mistake and making sure you don't make the same mistake again. But Clinton's personal arrogance or defensiveness (it's hard to figure out which is dominant) prevents her from that sort of self-criticism.

Indeed, her ritualistic (and politically timed) apology for her Iraq War vote in 2006 came across less than an honest recognition that she had done something horribly wrong than that she had to say something to appease a furious Democratic electorate as she mounted her first run for President against anti-Iraq War candidate Obama.