Saturday, March 7, 2015

I Still Support Hillary Clinton--But She Could Use A Challenge

For some time, I have had a somewhat uneasy feeling about Hillary Clinton as the prospective 2016 Democratic candidate for President.  The uneasiness comes from two sources that are really the same source:  her husband, both for his undisciplined personal life and for the manner in which that life led him to be arguably strong-armed into making concessions that a less compromised chief executive would have made.  More on that latter problem in a little bit.

Nevertheless, I have supported Hillary as Barack Obama's successor for some time, because I believe that her experience as a U.S. Senator and as Obama's Secretary of State (and yes, her experience as First Lady as well) make her the best qualified Democrat to make the case for continuing the progress achieved by the current Administration.  And yes, the idea of her breaking the ultimate glass ceiling is an intriguing one (although it should not be treated as a credential, however much it is historically overdue).

And then came the past week, and the revelation that she used a personal e-mail account to conduct State Department business while she was Secretary of State.  There seems to be some debate over whether it was, strictly speaking, legal for her to do so.  But ever if it was legal, the big question that hangs over this is whether it was wise.  A personal e-mail account, unlike one registered with and protected by the federal government, is far more vulnerable to hacking, especially by terrorists and others outside and inside the U.S. with the means and desire to harm us.  It seems to me like a terribly un-diplomatic thing for the nation's chief diplomat to do.

And that wasn't even the first question that popped into my head when I learned about this story.  Why would one of the nation's highest-ranking political leaders use a personal e-mail account to conduct official business?  The most glaringly obvious answer is that personal e-mails are exempt from production under the federal Freedom of Information Act, and therefore not subject to requirements for public disclosure--or, for that matter, a Congressional subpoena.  Not surprisingly, one immediate consequence of this story, beyond the story itself, is the revival of interest by the House of Representatives and the media in the Benghazi killings, and whether Hillary's personal e-mails contain anything that has not been previously disclosed.

But, perhaps worst of all, the single thing that astonished me the most was the seemingly cavalier attitude she has shown it addressing what is, even apart from partisan spin, a legitimate news story.  After a few days of silence, she announced via Twitter that she wants all of her e-mails to be made public.  I'm sorry, but this is not a disclosure you deal with via social media.  You immediately hold a press conference.  You answer all the questions.  In short, for both ethical and political reasons, you get in front of the story, and don't tag along behind it.

Unfortunately, Hillary's tweet seems, at least on the surface, to be of a piece with a larger perception of the Clintons as arrogant and entitled--a perception that is more than adequately explained here by New York Daily News sportswriter and occasional political analyst Mike Lupica.  Lupica, by the way, is nobody's idea of a knee-jerk conservative, so he is exempt from the type of criticism more deserved by the Fox Newses of the world.

And it is precisely this type of arrogance, vacillating with moments of surrender that made the presidency of Hillary's husband so infuriating (even for those of us, like me, who voted for him twice, because we knew the alternatives would be worse).  He gave away large portions of the New Deal with welfare reform and the Glass-Steagall repeal, in no small part perhaps because he hoped that doing so would end the investigations into his private life.  Of course, they didn't, because the Republicans aren't that charitable.  They impeached him anyway--and his response was to complain about the invasion of his privacy, a privacy he had systematically abused again and again, without regard to the lives he destroyed (see, e.g., Monica Lewinsky) in the process.

In the wake of this, it seems abundantly clear that Hillary needs a serious challenger in the Democratic primaries next year, one with the credentials to give her a serious race and the desire to expose anything else that needs exposure.  There are no shortage of possibilities:  Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Martin O'Malley.  Any one of them would serve the purpose.  But something has to be done to either prepare Hillary for the battering she is going to receive from what she has correctly referred to as the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy--or, if necessary, replace her at the top of the ticket.

I'm betting that she survives all of this.  As things stand at the moment, I still support her.  But my support isn't a blank check.  It never should be.  And I hope and pray that someone will step forward and clarifies whether or not she deserves it.

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