Now that we have an Inspector General’s report on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, are we any the wiser? Yes, she bent the rules to employ such a device. Yes, it was hackable, but what isn’t when the Chinese have apparently found their way into the Pentagon’s papers, the White House mail system and government personnel records?
It was certainly a stupid thing to do and might conceivably have risked compromising classified material, but so far there’s no evidence such leaks actually occurred. And yes, Hillary’s explanation for why she needed a private email server is absurd. She didn’t want to have to carry two phones. But people in her position have people to carry things for them.
Her political enemies which are legion have focused on her endangering national security and the alleged Clinton pattern of refusing to play by the same rules that apply to others. But apparently in this case several other Secretaries of State behaved similarly, and it seems the rules were in the process of changing.
And for Republicans to go there after Nixon (“It’s not illegal if the president does it”), Reagan’s Iran-Contra debacle, Bush and Cheney’s imaginary WMDs and their journey to “the dark side,” a private email server looks like pretty small beer when it comes to playing by your own rules.
Oddly, there has been surprisingly little focus on why she would do something so peculiar. Her friends probably feel that an honest answer would make her look paranoid and her critics in the vast right-wing conspiracy would prefer to traffic in claims of bad character than broach a topic that would reveal their own.
That’s because, as we all know, there really was a concerted effort by the Clintons’ partisan enemies to destroy his presidency by fair mean or foul. Truth had nothing to do with it. We have just endured another eight years of the same tactics aimed at Obama, the Muslim, Kenyan, socialist who is not an American citizen.
After four decades in the public eye and the endless invention of imaginary crimes, Hillary’s obvious motive in having her own email server was control, fueled by distrust This may have been crazy, but it might just as well have been realistic.
Consider the saga. A woman from a successful Chicago businessman’s family attends the finest schools where she excels, meets an impecunious spellbinder from the land of Bubba and follows him in pursuit of his destiny. A classic pol, he’s a lot less interested in money that in adulation and climbing the greasy pole.
But she’s used to upper-middle class creature comforts and somebody’s got to earn a buck to provide them. The salary of the Governor of Arkansas is not generous. So she gets a gig at one of the biggest law firms in that state. And as in every other state, there are one or two Democratic and Republican law firms that are the source of talent as administrations come and go, and behind the scenes they wheel and deal. Call it crony jurisprudence.
Where government and business meet, opportunities arise, money is made or lost and either way attorneys take a cut. So Hillary, as first lady and legal partner in a powerful firm, is soon on boards of directors, has chances to buy stock, buy land, make rain, and feather her nest.
The critics if the Clintons in the 1980s tried to make hay out of this, particularly Robert Bartley’s wild-eyed editorial page for the Wall Street Journal which disgraced itself by promulgating endless evidence-free conspiracy theories, enough to fill six volumes of collected rant.
Apparently Donald Trump owns a set because he is recycling some of the more lurid fantasies including the Clinton’s murder of friend and White House Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, suffering from depression and unable to bear the Washington pressure cooker Foster killed himself.
A money-losing land development deal in collaboration with Clinton friends who ran a failed savings and loan looked crooked to political enemies and may look like gross incompetence to the a wheeler dealer like Trump who plays with the bankruptcy laws as if they were a Stradivarius, but no crime was ever discovered, unless making a lousy investment with unreliable partners is a crime.
Clearly Trump has made a buck by standing at the nexus of money and power. He boasts of it. The companies the Wall Street Journal covers employ lobbyists and high priced legal talent to rig the game in their favor, as Bernie Sanders would say. Subjected to intense scrutiny over decades, very few members of Congress would emerge as pure paragons of public service.
One thing no one has ever denied about Bill Clinton is that he was shameless in his pursuit of women, perhaps even unscrupulous. He has that in common with many powerful men. No less a Republican icon than Henry Kissinger offered the adage that “power is an aphrodisiac.”
Trump has boasted of his conquests, but until now no one has claimed that Hillary was not Bill’s victim but his enabler. It took Trump to devise that spin. Presumably Ivana was guilty of the same crime.
Surely Hillary learned one lesson from the attempt to make a president’s philandering an impeachable offense, to make a Podunk land deal into Teapot Dome, to make her investments into insider trading and to make a troubled man’s suicide into murder. Trust no one. Keep control of your mail and papers and thoughts and tongue. Never tell anyone else the family’s business.
When you are treated like the Corleones long enough, you begin to behave like the Corleones. So you get a private email server. You hunker down. You become wary. You see enemies everywhere. And you might be right.
Those who know Hillary say she is likeable, funny, caring and smart, but as a candidate she comes across as programmed, guarded, cautions, artificial, and lacking in spontaneity. Small wonder. As Vince Foster said in his de facto suicide note, in Washington “ruining people is considered sport.“
Hillary Clinton seems to have set out in life to make a mark in the arena of public policy, not to become grist for the tabloid press. Her opponent in the fall election set out to make money and thrives on being tabloid fodder and a Howard Stern regular.
The greatest campaign chronicle ever written is “What It Takes” by Richard Ben Cramer. It describes how George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis, largely by turning over his campaign to Lee Atwater, a master of the smear willing to make an issue of a history of depression and alcohol abuse by Kitty Dukakis and to use the infamous Willie Horton ad to suggest Dukakis would free black rapists and murderers to prey on the innocent.
This fall’s contest may come down to who’s got what it takes, to the difference between Trump’s delight in getting down in the gutter and Hillary’s weariness at being the target of mudslinging. If so, he’s clearly got the edge, but is that a good thing? George Bernard Shaw said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” But of course, Shaw wasn’t running for president.