Pruden: The bad moon rising over Hillary

Hillary Clinton won’t be able to say she didn’t see the bad moon rising. Donald Trump gave her a blistering introduction this week to Presidential Politics 102, which differs in a remarkable way from Politics 101, which she encountered in her first attempt in 2008 and before that as the managing partner in Bubba’s two campaigns.

Whatever she learned from Bubba didn’t take. He was a master at covering his tracks and playing the rube when forced to, with a Huck Finn grin and country charm: “Aw, whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?” He got away with murder, and the goobers in the cheap seats loved him for it.

But Hillary is a different kind of Clinton. Bubba was in fact an actual good ol’ boy, a product of the unlikely Hot Springs casino culture that thrived among the hardshell Baptists and teetotaling Methodists, presided over by a mayor who paraded down the main street of the town he owned behind a brace of black and white horses he called Scotch and Soda. Bubba could get by with anything if he was respectful of the code he didn’t have to obey.

Hillary spent a term in Arkansas, which she despised and finally did everyone the favor of leaving. She was the Yankee lady only after the money. Bubba didn’t have anything against the money but all he really wanted were women — tall ones, short ones, blonde and brunette pastries occasionally washed down by a tall chocolate soda. And of course a political campaign, which Bubba played with the obsession that some men apply to golf or the horses.

Like the correct feminist that she is, Hillary spurns gallantry and the manners wrought by the gentle breeding prized by Southerners (sometimes honored only in the breech), but she expects the deference and the courtesy alien to her nonetheless. Donald Trump obviously understands this and is determined to give her the rough and ribald ride she is not prepared for.

In a “major address” this week he gave her the preview of the wrath to come, calling her “a world-class liar” who collected cash by the tub full when she was the secretary of State pretending to look out for the nation’s interests. “She gets rich,” he said, “by making you poor.”

He called her “the most corrupt person ever to run for president,” recognized as exaggeration and embroidery by anyone with a passing acquaintance with rude and rowdy frontier politics, but it had the ring of truth to anyone who has been reading the newspapers or watching cable television over the past two or three decades. The Clintons themselves wrote the book on Clinton corruption.

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