Enough With the Email, Already

In her latest column in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, presumably addressing her fellow journalists, exhorts her audience to start covering something about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign other than the email flap:

So this seems like an appropriate time to make what will seem like a naive suggestion: Could we possibly talk about something else? Like what, exactly, Clinton proposes to do about some of the challenges the country faces, and that she would confront as president?

I am not intimating that the e-mail issue doesn’t matter. It does, not only on its own terms but also because of what it suggests about Clinton’s instincts for secrecy and defensiveness and her seeming inability to learn from past mistakes. For six months, this has been like watching a political car crash in slow motion. Clinton and her team are guilty of political malpractice and chronic tone-deafness.

which I think is all well and good in its way. I think the FBI should continue its investigations, the State Department should continue its own, and the judge overseeing the FOIA request that started this whole ball of slime rolling should keep doing his job, all which would be greatly facilitated if Sec. Clinton were more forthcoming about what she did.

For example, we now know that she has persistently lied in this matter. Or, at the very least, was too incompetent to do her job. Several of the emails she exchanged on her private server were what is called “inherently classified”. That of itself creates grave problems for the serial explanations she has given of her actions. Sec. Clinton clearly shares a quality with her husband: a chronic inability to tell the truth when a lie would be more helpful to her politically.

However, this paragraph is what set me off:

Where E-mail Hillary comes off as prickly and defensive, Brookings Hillary projected toughness, intelligence and command of nuance. She was hardheaded not just about Iran (“This is not the start of some larger diplomatic opening”) but also about Russia (“I am in the category of people who wanted us to do more in response to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing destabilizing of Ukraine”) and Saudi Arabia (“Much of the extremism in the world today is a direct result of policies and funding undertaken by the Saudi government and individuals”). She came off as, well, presidential.

which reminded me of (I think) James Carville’s explanation of Bill Clinton—that there was a “Saturday night” Bill Clinton and a “Sunday morning” Bill Clinton. The problem is that we don’t elect personas to the presidency but people and “Email Hillary” and “Brookings Hillary” are the same person. She may issue position papers as “Brookings Hillary” but as president we can be pretty confident that she’ll act like “Email Hillary” because that’s what she’s been doing over the period of the last twenty years.

All of which to say is that Sec. Clinton isn’t presidential at all. “Brookings Hillary” would be fine as a consultant but do we really want four (or eight) years of “Email Hillary”? I don’t think so. Which implies to me that Hillary Clinton found her highest and best use as the junior senator from New York.

So, indeed, let’s move on. Let the course of justice work its way out and let the Democratic Party find a better candidate for president than Sec. Clinton, who either as “Email Hillary” or “Brookings Hillary”, is clearly not suited to the job by temperament or predisposition.