In the last ten days, I have become afflicted with a neurological condition, one that doesn’t exist in medical journals, a condition that didn’t exist until the early 1990’s. I call it “Hillary Derangement Syndrome.” Ever since Bill and Hillary Clinton began their run for the Oval Office in 1992, many people have been infected with this syndrome. It’s not physically harmful to the brain but it does drive people a little batty. This condition comes and goes. People of conservative backgrounds and members of the media are especially vulnerable to experiencing its symptoms.
Never have we seen such a virulent strain of “Hillary Derangement Syndrome” as in the first ten days of March. This latest outbreak started last Monday when the New York Times published a front-page story entitled “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules.” When I first heard about this story, I didn’t think it would generate much controversy, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. This story has created a firestorm, generating stunning volume of media coverage across the entire political and entertainment spectrum.
For those who have been on Mars or a deserted island for the last ten days, let me summarize very briefly the 
controversy. During the entirety of her tenure as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton used a personal email account for all governmental business. This email account was hosted by a private server housed in the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York, giving her and her aides control over who would have access to the emails. During this time, Mrs. Clinton did not have a governmental email account which was likely not illegal but certainly contrary to the letter and spirit of State Department regulations and the promise of transparency of the fledgling Obama Administration.
What has made this story so controversial is that, by using this private email account with what has been called a “homebrew” server instead of a “state.gov” account, Mrs. Clinton and those who represent her have had the ability to restrict which prying eyes can see what was contained in those emails. Her decision raises the following basic questions:
What was her motivation? Why did she choose to take this action less than two years after, as a Presidential candidate, having based the Bush Administration for “secret White House emails”? Will she turn over the private server to an independent third party? And by using a private server, was it more vulnerable to cyber-attacks by foreign governments like China or North Korea?
Today, after allowing this story to fester and grow into a cause celebre throughout the news and entertainment media, Mrs. Clinton finally gave a 20-minute press conference today to address the controversy and answer those key questions.
Mrs. Clinton’s answer to the #1 question (why did she do it?) is that she chose to use one email account for the convenience of carrying only one Blackberry rather than a personal device and a government device. She also said, in retrospect, that it would have been better for her to have used a state.gov email account and two devices. My first reaction was to call bullshit, since I’ve had multiple emails on my Blackberry for several years. However, a report from CNN indicated that, in fact, government-issued devices in 2009 did not permit the addition of a separate personal email account.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to her “convenience” answer. For years, I would have balked at the idea of using two different phones for personal and business communications. Many colleagues and friends of mine (working for one my company’s clients) complained recently when they were required to use a company-issued email account that they consider user-unfriendly. But they had to do it. These friends of mine are salespeople; they are not the Secretary of State for the United States of America! Mrs. Clinton had a choice between convenience and transparency and, big surprise, she chose convenience and lack of transparency. President Obama always criticizes the privileged elites for not “playing by the same set of rules.” Somehow he never noticed, in his communications with his Secretary of State, that she wasn’t using a government email account because he said he learned about the controversy in the same manner as the rest of us, from news reports.
If Mrs. Clinton’s motivation went beyond convenience, as most people suspect, she had to know that this would eventually be criticized for her decision, although possibly not to this extent. The most plausible answer that she would never admit to is that she, being a naturally secretive person, wanted to maintain control of her records “just in case” she wrote something that she would later regret or would become politically toxic. An example would be if, hypothetically, she had emailed Ambassador Chris Stevens in August 2012 that she didn’t think the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi needed more security. Such an email, if it existed, would have been a “who cares” along with tens of thousands of others except for the fact that the Embassy was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2012, an attack that resulted in the deaths of four Americans including the Ambassador. The point is that an email is a permanent record that expresses a person’s directives or opinions. Comments that may be innocuous at the time can become controversial later as events change.
The answer to the question about whether Mrs. Clinton is hiding something will forever be impossible to know and that’s part of her problem. She may be hiding nothing but because she and her staff had full control over the server, she or any delegate had the ability to permanently delete an email that did not reflect well on her. There is no way we will ever know if this happened because she emphatically stated today that her server will remain private and that she would not turn it over to an independent third party. She has already turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department but it’s the possibility of 10 to 12 politically damaging and permanently erased emails that will be the source of endless speculation. Her defense was essentially what CNN’s David Gergen called a “trust me” defense, which is one that invites suspicion about any politician.
Mrs. Clinton made the point (correctly) that most government employees have personal accounts and it’s a “trust me”
point that the individual is personally responsible for disclosing those emails (either by forwarding or printing) to the appropriate agencies. A big however, though, is that is exceedingly rare in today’s digital universe for such a prominent official to exclusively use their personal email. If you have both, the government emails are theoretically by definition preserved on a government server and the employee just has to forward the rare government-related email from their personal account. By relying exclusively on her personal account, the State Department had nothing without her after-the-fact cooperation. (By the way, the reason I used the word theoretically is that there is a controversy over missing emails by former IRS chief Lois Lerner in the scandal of the IRS deliberately targeting Tea Party Groups for audits and denial of tax-exempt status).
As for the question of security, about whether her personal “homebrew” server was more vulnerable to a cyber-attack by a foreign government, it’s another “who knows” but it certainly is plausible. The server itself, set up originally for President Clinton, is guarded by the Secret Service in their home but that wouldn’t stop an off-site cyber-attack. The cynic in me, of course, would say that the server of the State Department in our perfectly functioning government is just as hackable as a private account.
So, let’s get back to why the “Hillary Derangement Syndrome” has been so pervasive in the past ten days. Why is this particular scandal gaining such a high level of traction in the mainstream media when the recent disclosures that the Clinton Foundation had accepted donations from foreign governments didn’t generate much buzz at all and most of the media has ignored or downplayed the multiple scandals during the years of the Obama Administration?
I see few reasons for this: first, this is something that the members of the general public understand. Tens of millions of ordinary people who work for a living have been confronted with the “work vs personal” issue regarding their cell phones and/or their email accounts. Millions upon millions of us have at times in our professional lives been confronted with this scenario and have grudgingly “toed the company line” by using company-controlled communications. So this story plays directly into feelings that the Clintons feel a sense of entitlement and that the rules apply to everybody else but not to them.
This story, because of its relatability to the average American, is similar to the controversies of Mitt Romney not releasing all of his tax returns or whether New Jersey Governor Chris Christie knew that his aides were purposely causing traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge as political payback to the Mayor of Fort Lee. As ordinary Americans, we all have to pay taxes and those of us who live in densely populated urban areas know all about traffic. The media furor over “Bridge-gate” has effectively ended any realistic chance Christie had of securing the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and Romney’s “Tax-Return-Gate” reinforced Obama’s narrative that the rich didn’t “play by the same set of rules” and was likely a contributing factor to his defeat.
I was truly stunned in the past week by how much coverage this Clinton email story received. After years of watching tepid or dutiful coverage of Obama Administration scandals (such as the IRS targeting of conservatives, Obama’s “you can keep your healthcare,” etc.), the ferocity of the coverage of Mrs. Clinton resembled a pack of hyenas let out of a cage, deprived of food for weeks. It’s not like it was a slow news week: there was the extraordinary spectacle of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, there was the Supreme Court considering a legal challenge that has the potential to unravel Obamacare, there was the DOJ finding of widespread and endemic racism in the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, and there was the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama, one of the key events in the Civil Rights Movement. This week had lots of news.
But none of these news events received as much coverage as Email-gate. This news story was not confined to Fox News. I took the time last week to watch some MSNBC programs (likely doubling their audience) and was surprised to see that it was the lead story on two or the network’s primetime shows (Hardball with Chris Matthews and The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell) for several days. Matthews and O’Donnell both make their living skewering Republicans with often partisan zealotry as many Fox anchors do for the other side. Not this past week. O’Donnell in particular had a tone of contempt and disbelief that he usually reserves for the GOP, dismissing and laughing off the comments of former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who tried feebly to defend Mrs. Clinton’s actions as “following precedent.” Matthews asked a very pointed question of two of his guests, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt (who broke the story) and the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan, if they had received this story from right-wing activists. Both of them, who work for predominately liberal-leaning newspapers, insisted earnestly that the story developed organically. The Republicans are making this “a big deal NOW,” Gearan said, but were not the source for the story.
On the five Sunday morning week-in-review news programs (NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, and CNN’s State of the Union), the Clinton email story dominated the news coverage and panel conversations and there was bi-partisan condemnation (or at least consternation) over Hillary’s silence during the entire controversy. And of course, the story did not escape the humor mill either, with Jon Stewart making fun on the Daily Show and Kate McKinnon doing a hysterical spoof of Mrs. Clinton in the opening five minutes of Saturday Night Live. (If you haven’t seen it, I high recommend watching, it’s hysterical!)
So, finally, the $64 billion question is whether this story will have any legs, will it have any impact over Hillary Clinton’s unchallenged coronation as the Democratic nominee for president and her likely general election campaign against the GOP party nominee to be crowned later.
My guess is that this scandal will not in any way derail Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable march to her party’s nomination but I guarantee that the party poohbahs are sweating, hoping and praying that no more shoes drop. The worst thing that would happen to the party would be for more stories of this type to emerge in a campaign with nobody to challenge or replace her on the ticket. Ironically, I think Hillary would probably be better off if she did receive a legitimate competitor. Without one, there will be no debates, nothing on the Democratic Party side to satisfy or distract the media beast, and nothing to prepare Hillary for the rough-and-tumble general election attack ads and debates. Whoever emerges as the GOP nominee will be battle tested with a dozen debates and hundreds of personal attacks.
As for whether this story has legs or will wither away, it’s hard to say. Mrs. Clinton didn’t do herself any favors by waiting over a week to comment on the story. It seems like every Democratic politician or strategist in the universe was forced to defend or not defend her before she defended herself. Both President Obama and the current Secretary of State John Kerry were semi-compelled to weigh in before we heard more than a single Tweet from Hillary herself. She allowed it to fester and grow into the mega-media event that it became. Her news conference today was fairly brief, fairly weak and left the throng of media in attendance wanting for more. Still, with the Clinton’s firmly in control over the original source of all of her emails, it seems highly unlikely that any “smoking gun” will emerge here.
What matters in in the end if whether this has any impact on Mrs. Clinton in a general election campaign against her Republican opponent. It’s too soon to tell but what we are learning here and what we learned from the tepid response to her book tour last year is that she is a deeply flawed candidate. She is not the natural politician that her husband is and her propensity for secrecy will frustrate and annoy the media, which will lead to vastly more scrutiny than Obama received eight years ago. She is also not a natural successor to Obama’s progressive legacy. With big money ties to Wall Street, her six figure speeches, and Clinton Foundation ties to nefarious foreign governments, she is politically more of a Romney-style candidate than an Obama-style candidate.
If her last name were not Clinton and if there was not a groundswell in the Democratic Party for a ground-breaking “first woman president,” I think there would be a dozen challengers for the party nomination within weeks and that she would be stuck in political traffic with Chris Christie on the George Washington Bridge. But because of huge advantage of the Clinton name, the Clinton political machine, the Clinton donor base, and the natural advantage that the Dems have with the Electoral College, she’s still the most likely next President of the United States.