March 6^th

Ruth Marcus goes after Hillary Clinton today for doing public business with her private email account. Ruth Marcus is hardly a conservative so when she is unhappy with a liberal who is the likely nominee for the Democratic Presidential nomination people should pay attention, particularly people like me.

Hillary Clinton was, and is a very powerful person; a former First Lady, a former United States Senator, then a Secretary of State and now a likely candidate for the Presidency. Marcus makes no allowances for Hillary’s stature; her use of a private email account was clearly against State Department policy. Marcus quotes an impressive array of documents which support that conclusion.

So why would a savvy political operative like Hillary Clinton do such a thing? Most likely much of it was pure hubris; she did it because she had the power to do it. Which of her advisors would risk a six-figure plus salary by suggesting to Ms. Clinton that there were departmental rules against the practice? She probably also did it because she wanted to control access to her emails after being the target of right wingers over Benghazi; it was a bad decision. This private email business, once it became public, resulted in Clinton putting a “Kick me” sign on her back. Now she is trying to remove it by releasing 50 thousand emails with the result that her opponents ask, “How do we know that these are all of them?”  That’s an unanswerable question. By trying to remedy the problem she has taken down the “Kick me” sign and replaced it with a new “Kick me harder” sign.

The remedy may be time: it will be a year before the real election combat begins. The public is likely to be bored by the whole thing soon  in spite of right wing “ain’t it awful” efforts to keep it alive. We’d better hope that this is the case because Hillary is our only realistic candidate. Elizabeth Warren plans not to run; even so, Elizabeth is keeping her powder dry. Good thing too; we might need her!