Donald Trump is going around saying Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State ever. One suspects The Donald hasn’t done an in-depth analysis. She probably wasn’t as good as Jefferson, John Quincy Adams or George Marshall, but was surely better than John C. Calhoun, Frederick Frelinghuysen or Al Haig.
However, there can be little doubt that Mrs. Clinton is a really bad retail politician. Take the endless, clumsily-handled flap over her personal email server, please. It displays all her worst characteristics – arrogance, secretiveness, entitlement, unlikeability, and lack, of adroitness.
When it became known she had a private email server in contravention of government and Obama administration rules, she dismissed complaints as wrong-headed, trivial, partisan, and beneath her dignity to address. Wasn’t she Hillary Clinton? When the issue didn’t go away, she stonewalled. When that didn’t work, she offered a few talking points that fell short of a full explanation and returned to stonewalling. She then ballyhooed turning over a whole lot of emails, but didn’t address deleting others.
The more she bobs and weaves, the more her enemies assume she has something to hide. Probably not that she’s a North Korean mole, but probably views on matters that turned out to be wrong, or candid remarks whose publication would be embarrassing. But now a couple government Inspectors General are looking into whether she was careless with classified material.
Probably. She wouldn’t be alone since far too much that government does is routinely classified, which helps keep government unaccountable. Furthermore, leaking when it is self-serving is a traditional bipartisan sport. Much would be made of any revelations, but only because Washington doesn’t follow the “he who casts the first stone” rule.
Still, Hillary is going to have to come up with a lot better explanation of why, other than arrogance, she behaved as if the rules didn’t apply to her. Claiming a private server made her life easier than having separate email addresses for personal and official traffic is a non-starter. So is claiming that you’ve released all the emails people need to see, or crabbing that any further demands are “because you are out to get me, you partisan pigs and media jackals.”
It’s a little late for Secretary Clinton to take a different tack since, as usual, Hillary is dug in and defiant and unlikely to budge. But just off the top of my head, there are a couple damage control spins she might want to consider. They probably wouldn’t get the IGs and Republican hounds off her trail, but they might win her some sympathy or muddy the waters fruitfully.
Spin One: The “Who Can Make Sense of this Tech Stuff” shtick.
Hillary could say that it was embarrassing to admit, but she isn’t tech savvy, probably because she’s a senior citizen. She asked somebody in the geek squad how to avoid having two email accounts and two or three incomprehensible gadgets she’d have to keep track of and update and all that. They said, get a private server and use one email. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but nobody ever does with IT guys. So she trusted them and now regrets it, just like the rest of us. She had a busy life saving the world and bringing peace, democracy and feminism to far-off lands. The tech fix seemed to solve her problem, until it blew up in her face.
This would get her sympathy from anyone over forty who can’t figure out what twitter is or how to program their DVR, people who inadvertently send emails to the whole office instead of the intended recipient or keep butt-dialing people they never want to talk to again. The downside of this spin is that it doesn’t make Hillary look very presidential. But she isn’t looking very presidential now—except in a shifty, Nixonian way. This would at least allow her to look human.
Spin Two: The “Never Trust the Government” technique.
A more aggressive solution, more in keeping with Hillary’s basically suspicious, cold-blooded, take no prisoners style, would be to suggest the she got her own email server not in order to put classified material at risk, but to protect it from danger.
Like everyone else on earth, Hillary could say that she knew going into the job at State that the government’s computer systems were outmoded crap, leaky sieves that any wicked regime from Putin’s Russia to Murdock’s Fox could easily hack. Hasn’t the daily news proven as much? Snowden, the Chinese hacking of President Obama’s email, the theft of data on millions of employees from the files of the government’s personnel office. The list is endless.
Hillary could argue that, as the Secretary of State, she had no power to fix the government’s lousy computer security, but she did have the power to protect her own security. She got a private server, and as whining by Congress to see her emails proves, it worked. They still haven’t been able to breach Hillary’s security, unlike that of the rest of the government.
She could then go on the offensive. If elected present, she would make it Job One to improve and update government tech, to make it impregnable to cyber-attack, so that all government secrets, not just those of cyber savvy Secretary Clinton, would be kept safe. No one would ever again have to get their own private server just to keep their mail and papers away from prying eyes. Take that, sniping critics. I know who you are. I am monitoring your email. My drones are watching you. Hillary Prime 2016.