HILLARY CLINTON’S YUGE ELECTABILITY PROBLEM
My daughter the one-percenter, an Ivy-educated San Francisco web expert and a staunch progressive, is furious at the Democratic establishment for short-sightedly clearing the arena for Hillary Clinton and keeping potential Gen X candidates off the national stage. Though at best a luke-warm Sanders supporter, she says she’ll vote for Hillary in the general only if the state of California is in play. (If it isn’t, she’ll vote for a protest candidate on the left.) She’ll acknowledge that Hillary is a hard worker with plenty of experience, but to her Hillary, like Jeb, is a stale, uncreative, minimally talented opportunist from a tiresome family who already had their turn. She doubts that Hillary can generate enough enthusiasm in people under 45 to be elected.
Hillary’s, um, flexible relationship with the truth is not an issue for my daughter, as she assumes all politicians are liars. For me it is an issue – maybe the most important issue. Not that I care whether a politician deceives deliberately or whether she deludes herself into believing what she says, eg that it was perfectly fine for a Secretary of State to conduct national business on an unsecure home server.
I agree with Frank Rich’s assessment yesterday at New York Magazine:
Clinton’s weakness was further highlighted on the eve of the Iowa vote by the Times editorial endorsing her over the weekend — an endorsement that provoked anger among the paper’s readers, who responded with an avalanche of comments that probably reflect the overall sentiment of the Democratic grass roots. The editorial was fascinatingly defensive. In making the case for Clinton, the paper praised Clinton’s experience in foreign affairs but never mentioned her biggest foreign-policy failure, her vote to authorize the war in Iraq. And the editorial never mentioned the murky finances of the Clinton family foundation, a continuing source of fascination to investigative reporters at every major news organization in the country, including the Times. Even as the editorial was published, Peter Baker, the paper’s chief White House correspondent, was telling CNN that inquiries by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department into Clinton’s email practices as secretary of State could lead to a summer indictment or a request for a special prosecutor — which, in his words, “basically turns this into a complete disaster for the Democrats in which it is too late to change horses.” Even if Clinton had romped over Bernie Sanders in Iowa, it wouldn’t have countered the uncertainty and anxiety that attend her vulnerable presidential campaign in an election cycle when, clearly, anything can happen.
Bernie may not want to go there, but Marco Rubio mentioned Hillary’s email problem in his “victory” speech Monday night. The Republican blogosphere is lit up with it, and has been for quite some time. Here’s the thing: while the Benghazi “scandal” is nothing but Republicans deflecting onto Hillary their own guilt for not funding adequate military support of diplomatic operations in the Middle East, the email thing is real. Democrats had better wake up to this before it’s too late.
For a Secretary of State to choose to conduct official business via an unencrypted private server was reckless beyond anything Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Republicans are not wrong when they froth that Chinese and Russian hackers were probably reading all of Hillary’s email from Day Two of her tenure as Secretary of State. She can spin this all she wants, but they were probably reading the email between her and President Obama. Even if it is true that she did it for her own “convenience” (and not to hide influence peddling by the Clinton Global Initiative), it is far from exculpatory that material apparently cut and pasted and emailed to her from the ultra-secure official site may not have been re-marked to declare its intended secrecy. It is, after all, John Kerry’s State Department that has declared twenty-two of the latest batch of emails too sensitive to release to the public. Clinton surrogates who insist this is retroactive “overclassification run amok” don’t – shouldn’t – know what’s in them. I fear this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Sick as we are with hearing about Hillary’s damn emails, her opponent in the general election will surely keep them front and center, assuming she beats Bernie and isn’t indicted before the nominating convention. Legal or not, they will remain evidence of breathtakingly poor judgment on her part. The shifting lies she has told about them may ultimately prove her even less authentic than calling herself a progressive on Monday and a centrist on Tuesday.
So given that Bernie’s electability is a fair question, much as I admire him, I believe my daughter has a point.