How a "Checkers" speech could have saved Clinton

In my previous post, I observed that one of Clinton's fatal mistakes in her campaign was her decision to allow herself to be "Swiftboated" by Trump and and his surrogates, to basically allow them to label her a corrupt, lying crook, without forcefully pushing back against the charges. This created a narrative in the minds of many voters that as dangerous and distasteful as Trump was, Clinton was just as bad.

Lessons from Richard Nixon

Historically speaking, Clinton could have learned a lot from Richard Nixon.
No, not the corrupt Nixon of Watergate infamy, but the then-unknown junior senator of 1952 who saved his political career with the brilliant "Checkers" speech on national television. Picked as Dwight Eisenhower's running mate because of his Cold War, anti-communist activism, Nixon was in danger of being jettisoned from the ticket when questions arose that he was profiting from a political slush fund. Long before his "I'm not a crook" press conference as president 20 years later, a deliberate, poised Nixon went on national television to rebut the charges one by one, culminating the speech with the famous reference to the puppy "Checkers" that had been given to his daughters as a gift, and defiantly saying it would not be going back.

While the Checkers reference became ingrained in political history, it was Nixon's words at the beginning of the speech that were most telling -- both in 1952 and 2016.
 "The usual political thing to do when charges are made against you is to either ignore them or to deny them without giving details."

The price of silence

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Clinton did in 2016. To the incessant chants of "Lock her Up," she said nothing. To the debate claims that she deleted 33,000 emails to foil an FBI probe, she pivoted back to Trump's taxes. To the allegations that she personally profited from the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation, not a word. To the perception that she told Wall Street bankers one thing and blue-collar workers something different, nothing more than a nuanced allusion to the movie "Lincoln." What Hillary Clinton should have done is what Nixon did in 1952. She should have gone on national television and addressed in painstaking detail every charge that had been leveled at her during the campaign. If she had, I think she would be president-elect today. Instead, she banked on the idea that voters would be more offended by Donald Trump than any questions about her character and integrity. Sadly, she was wrong. 

Pundits and politicians often focus on what not to do when studying Richard Nixon. This is one case where studying a bold action that saved his political career could have saved Hillary Clinton's campaign.