Quo vadis, status quo?

Do you remember how the second “Godfather” movie ends? Kay, though not in so many words, asks Michael to lie to her about his involvement in the family business, and he complies. He tells her a big fatty, and she knows it’s a big fatty, tragically so, but her love for him is such that she chooses self-deception over loneliness. She leaves his office then, and the door closes behind her, but not before we see Michael’s consiglieri moving into frame around him, taking her place, kissing his hand. Nothing has changed but her, we realize, and that for the very worst.

The Clinton camp’s embrace of their candidate’s positional “evolution” feels to me a lot like Kay’s embrace of Michael’s lie. The consiglieri gathering around her as they close the door are for-profit prisons, Wall Street hedge fund managers, Panamanian shell companies and big pharma lobbyists, and the door itself is a white noise machine pointed at the media. Or speech transcripts withheld. Or hard drives wiped.