Hillary Clinton: A Pay-Phone Candidate in an iPhone WorldThe Democrat trots out tired tactics and stale strategies in email news conference.Hillary Rodham Clinton is an ancient presidential candidate. Not age-wise. Attitude-wise.
Staggered by self-inflicted wounds, the former secretary of State faced a choice between the right way and wrong way to manage a public-relations crisis in the post-Internet era, when the 1990s tactics of deflection, deception, and victimization are far less effective. She chose the wrong way.
Rather than be transparent, completely honest, and accountable, Clinton doubled down on the 1990s. She refused to turn over her emails stored on a secret service in violation of federal regulations. She defended contributions to her family's charity from foreign nations that discriminate against women and support terrorism, a brazen contradiction to her public profile.
"I fully complied with every rule I was governed under," she said, a legalistic dodge that rivals Al Gore's lame defense of his fund-raising shenanigans in 1997: "There is no controlling legal authority."
She dodged legitimate accusations, parried accusations that were never in play, and coolly laid out a defense that you could boil down to five words: "Trust me, I'm a Clinton."
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Clinton had a four-point response:
1. She decided to use her personal email account for both work and private business as a matter of convenience. "Looking back," she said, "it would have been better had I simply used a separate account."
That was as close as Clinton got to contrition, and even this talking point was misplaced. Nobody questions her right to use a personal account for work-related matters. Nobody seeks to make truly private emails public. The issue is Clinton's clear violation of federal regulations requiring her to store official emails on government servers. For reasons she left unsaid, Clinton went rogue.
A home-brewed server gives her full control of government records. Theoretically, she can delete or withhold public documents without the public ever knowing.
2. The "vast majority" of her emails went to government authorities, which means they would be captured by people who (unlike her) followed federal rules. Clinton didn't put a number to "vast majority" or characterize what material was contained in the "minority" of emails lost. Presumably, though, they're on the server she won't cough up.
3. After she left the State Department, House Republicans investigating the Benghazi attack discovered that they had none of her emails and notified State. The agency asked all former secretaries of State to turn over their emails. With her cache secured on an off-the-books server, Clinton decided which ones to turn over: only 30,490 of 62,320 emails, according to her office. More than 31,000 were deleted! It is irrelevant that Clinton says the notes are private. Those are our emails, not hers. A government archivist, not a Clinton, is suppose to decide what is private and what is public.
4. She took the "unprecedented step of asking the State Department to make my work-related emails public for everyone to see." Gee, thanks. We can see the emails you want us to see?
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Trust me, I'm a Clinton. This is part of a decades-old pattern: For all their strengths, Hillary and Bill Clinton have a weakness for victimization, entitlement, and their unbounded belief that the ends justify the means.
Rules are for little people, not them.
She had a choice—the right way or the wrong way, the new way or the old way. She chose to turn back the clock to the 1990s, when her husband's White House overcame its wrongdoing by denying the truth, blaming Republicans, and demonizing and bullying the media.
She unleashed the hounds of Whitewater. David Brock demanded a correction from The New York Times, which broke the email story. James Carville dismissed the charges as "right-wing talking points." A slightly less-worn henchman, Howard Dean, called one of my stories "trash." These retreads made Clinton look small....
http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/hillary-clinton-a-pay-phone-candidate-in-an-iphone-world-20150310