3.15.15 HRC Clips

HRC Clips

March 15, 2015

 

 

HRC

A Young Manager for Clinton Juggles Data and Old Baggage  (The New York Times).................... 2

As governor, Bush talked about troops in private e-mail (The Washington Post)............................. 5

President Obama jokes about Clinton’s emails, Scott Walker and marijuana at Gridiron Club dinner (Washington Post)      9

President Obama jokes about Peril, promise of Clinton candidacy both on display lately (Associated Press)  14

Hillary’s meritocracy problem: The GOP will paint her as an elitist — and the right can make that charge stick (Salon)       16

Hillary Clinton Spokesman: We Did Read Each Email (The Wall Street Journal).......................... 19

A timeline of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail saga  (The Washington Post)............................................... 21

State Dept. email archiving process puts Clinton on the spot (CNN)............................................. 24

GOP to Clinton: Hand over your email server (CBS News)........................................................... 26

Hillary Clinton Seeks to Reassure Democrats on Email Controversy (The New York Times)........ 28

Clinton’s control issues  (The Washington Post)............................................................................. 29

Clinton easily beats any rivals in poll  (Los Angeles Times)............................................................. 31

Will April bring shower of announcements? (The Hill).................................................................. 33

Hillary Clinton: running to win - but on her own terms (The Guardian)........................................ 35

Today’s Woman (The New Yorker)............................................................................................... 42

 

 

A Young Manager for Clinton Juggles Data and Old Baggage  (The New York Times)

By Amy Chozick

March 15, 2015

The New York Times

 

On MSNBC last week, 70-year-old James Carville denounced the coverage of his old friend Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a personal email account at the State Department, ticking off two decades’ worth of scandals surrounding the Clintons that he attributed to an irresponsible news media.

Mr. Carville complained to the host, Andrea Mitchell, that he had ‘‘lived through this.’’

‘‘Do you remember Whitewater?’’ he asked. ‘‘Do you remember Filegate? You remember Travelgate? You remember Pardongate? You remember Benghazi?’’

Meanwhile, far from the television lights, Robby Mook, the 35-year-old who is likely to manage Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, kept his head down and worked the phones from his standing desk to build a field operation in Iowa, set up technology to collect data to target voters and hire a campaign staff in a handful of key states. Mr. Mook was 12 and auditioning for school plays in Vermont when Bill Clinton was first elected president. He was a popular high school freshman when Kenneth W. Starr investigated Whitewater.

The uproar over Mrs. Clinton’s use of personal email as secretary of state, which shielded her correspondence from public records requests, has presented the first media firestorm in her pursuit of the White House. But it has also revealed the stark generational divide that confronts her budding 2016 campaign.

Over more than two decades in national politics, the Clintons have amassed an army of well-meaning defenders who will bring to 2016 old battle wounds and axes to grind that date back to the White House and Arkansas -- perhaps not the ideal message in a presumptive campaign that seeks to reintroduce the 67-year-old Mrs. Clinton as a fresh, forward-looking candidate.

It falls largely on Mr. Mook, and the band of young operatives he has assembled (called the Mook Mafia), to move the grievance-laden Clinton machine into the modern political age. The success of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign will rest in part on whether this younger generation of earnest, data- and social-media-savvy operatives can prevail.

‘‘They are going to be the first ones to hit the beach on D-Day,’’ said Chris Lehane, a Democratic operative and former aide to Mr. Clinton. ‘‘To get the campaign off the beach while under fire, the front-line troops will need to be in charge and empowered to run a modern-day, forward looking, smart campaign.’’

The Clintons anointed Mr. Mook as much for his ease with data and technology as for his calm temperament. They value his rare ability to charm and include the abundant advice-givers without allowing them to become too intrusive. Still, asserting himself among so many influential veterans will not be easy.

Even as Mr. Mook was starting to build the infrastructure of the campaign, a crowded circle of advisers joined him in deliberating over how Mrs. Clinton should respond to the email controversy. They included John D. Podesta, her presumptive campaign chairman, who has known the Clintons since George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972; the former Clinton administration officials Cheryl D. Mills and James E. Kennedy; Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Mrs. Clinton; and Mandy Grunwald, who has advised the Clintons since 1992.

Ultimately, the strategy they settled on -- having Mrs. Clinton publicly address the controversy on Tuesday -- harked back to the approach used in 1994, when Mrs. Clinton, wearing a blush-colored sweater set, held a lengthy news conference to address the Whitewater inquiry and a 1970s commodities trade in Arkansas. Comparisons quickly erupted. ‘‘Mrs. Clinton is stuck in the ‘90s,’’ declared the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The next day, the operation took its first coordinated step toward wrangling the Clintons’ old friends and former aides, like Mr. Carville. Mrs. Clinton’s 31-year-old press secretary, Nick Merrill, hosted a conference call with about 25 far-flung surrogates to make sure they delivered the same message about the emails.

Part of why Mr. Mook landed the job was that in 2013, as the campaign manager for Terry McAuliffe -- a close friend to Mr. Clinton who is now governor of Virginia -- he deftly nurtured the Clintons’ vast network of friends with frequent phone calls, but did not get distracted by the noise and drama that often attaches itself to the couple.

‘‘Eighty percent of it is people just want to be heard, and Robby was always available,’’ said Tina Flournoy, chief of staff to Mr. Clinton.

He particularly impressed Mr. Clinton, who may be the ultimate strategist of his wife’s 2016 campaign. The former president checked in often about specific districts or counties, but Mr. Mook did not change course based on his influence, said Mr. McAuliffe, who compared him to ‘‘a horse in the Kentucky Derby’’ with blinders on.

‘‘President Clinton loved him, and they had a great relationship,’’ Mr. McAuliffe said in an interview. ‘‘But Robby is happiest when he is in his office with his computers and his data.’’

It helped, of course, that Mr. Mook led that campaign to an unlikely victory after Mr. McAuliffe’s first attempt at the governor’s office flamed out in the 2009 Democratic primary.

Brennan Bilberry, the McAuliffe campaign’s communications director, described Mr. Mook’s approach as ‘‘test everything, question assumptions and let data drive things.’’

Mr. Mook was inducted into the extended Clinton family during the 2008 presidential primary, when he was Mrs. Clinton’s state campaign director in Indiana, Nevada and Ohio: three states that were rare bright spots for Mrs. Clinton in her bruising battle against Barack Obama.

But despite Mr. Mook’s efforts, the campaign did not keep pace with the Obama team’s use of social media, digital targeting and data analytics.

‘‘The Clinton field program was not at the same level of sophistication,’’ said Geoff Garin, who succeeded Mark Penn as Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist in 2008 and was Mr. McAuliffe’s pollster. ‘‘By the time of the 2013 campaign, Robby was advancing the state of the art rather than trying to catch up with it.’’

That will take some getting used to for the Clintons, who came to power when cellphones seemed state of the art. In her last campaign, Mrs. Clinton tapped Patti Solis Doyle, an aide since 1992, as manager. Ms. Doyle was later ousted, and Maggie Williams, another former White House aide to Mrs. Clinton, took over.

‘‘Maintaining your relationships and doing it well takes work, and it’s a credit to them,’’ Ms. Flournoy said of the Clintons.

The unassuming son of a retired physics professor and hospital administrator, Mr. Mook, who did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article, wears a simple uniform of chinos and a polo shirt. He keeps an exhausted campaign staff energized late nights with his goofy sense of humor, including a killer impersonation of Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Mook joined the McAuliffe campaign directly from his job as executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (‘‘without even taking a day off,’’ Mr. Garin said). He irked some old Clinton operatives by bringing in a mostly new campaign staff to help with Mr. McAuliffe’s second attempt at the governor’s office.

And the group surrounding him has its detractors, who say Mr. Mook has recreated the cliquish atmosphere that prevented fresh voices from penetrating the Clinton orbit in the past.

In November, ABC News reported on leaked messages from an email list operated by Mr. Mook and another young Democratic aide. The sophomoric jokes they contained about Mr. Clinton were not particularly damaging but did raise some concerns about their discretion.

But other episodes suggest a maturity to Mr. Mook. In 2008, after the Obama campaign’s offices in Indiana were vandalized, he reached out to Mitch Stewart, Mr. Obama’s state director, to offer him and his staff the use of the Clinton campaign space. The gesture, and others like it, endeared Mr. Mook not just to the Clintons but also to Obama aides, many of whom have signed on to senior positions under Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Mook’s experience working for the Clintons leaves him well-positioned to bridge the campaign’s generational gap. ‘‘He’s old from the perspective that he worked for the Clintons in 2008, and new enough that he wasn’t really part of the inner circle of running the campaign,’’ said Thomas R. Nides, a friend and adviser who worked for Mrs. Clinton at the State Department.

No one could have predicted that the first big test of his abilities would come so early, with the email controversy, but people close to Mr. Mook say he has blocked out the crisis and is focused on the expected start of the campaign in April.

‘‘He will be, I think, in a Hillary campaign what he was in the McAuliffe campaign,’’ said Ellen Qualls, a Democratic strategist based in Alexandria, Va. ‘‘King of avoiding distractions and shiny objects.’’

As governor, Bush talked about troops in private e-mail (The Washington Post)

By Ed O’Keefe

March 15, 2015

The Washington Post

 

Jeb Bush used his private e-mail account as Florida governor to discuss security and military issues such as troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants, according to a review of publicly released records.

The e-mails include two series of exchanges involving details of Florida National Guard troop deployments after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the review by The Washington Post found.

Aides to Bush said Saturday that none of the e-mails contained sensitive or classified information, and that many of the events mentioned in them were documented in press accounts, either contemporaneously or later. But security experts say private e-mail systems such as the one used by Bush are more vulnerable to hackers, and that details such as troop movements could be exploited by enemies.

Bush is actively considering a run for president and has sharply criticized likely Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton for her use of a private e-mail account when she served as secretary of state. He called it “baffling” that Clinton didn’t consider the potential security risks of discussing diplomatic and national security issues by using an e-mail account not tied to a government server. An unknown number of the e-mails housed on Bush’s server were redacted or withheld from public release because they contained sensitive security issues, Bush representatives have said. Communications director Tim Miller said general policy was for Bush to discuss sensitive National Guard issues in person with only occasional briefings by e-mail that “wouldn’t contain information that should not be in the public domain.”

“This Democrat opposition research dump of a few innocuous e-mails that Gov. Bush voluntarily posted on a Web site only highlights how large the gap is between him and Clinton in the area of transparency,” Miller said in a statement.

As governor, Bush used his account, jeb@jeb.org, to conduct official, political and personal business, including plans to woo new businesses to the state, judicial appointments and military matters, the e-mail records show. His e-mail server was housed at the governor’s office in Tallahassee during his two terms; he took it with him when he left office in 2007.

He later turned over about 280,000 e-mails for state archives under the requirements of Florida records laws, or about half of the total e-mails on the server.

In one e-mail sent four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the top general for the Florida Air National Guard told Bush that “we are actively planning sequences in preparation for mobilization orders should they come.”

“They have not come at this time,” wrote Ronald O. Harrison, who was adjutant general of Florida. “We are pretty good at anticipating the type of forces potentially needed and are prepared to respond to the Presidents call.”

“Keep me informed of the mobilization,” Bush wrote in reply.

Bush officials noted that many of the deployment orders issued after 9/11 were included in news reports at the time, including some of those mentioned in the Bush e-mails.

In November 2001, Bush and an aide to then-Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan exchanged messages about the deployment of National Guard troops to a nuclear power plant in Crystal River, Fla. The aide wrote Bush that a state lawmaker had called to say she thought “it is imperative that the Crystal River nuclear facility have National Guard security.”

Bush wrote back: “Florida power does not want it. We are reducing or getting rid of guard protection in the other plants.”

Aides to Bush argue that the nuclear plant discussions were innocuous and mostly public anyway. After the 9/11 attacks, the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned that terrorists might try to attack nuclear power plants.

Bush dispatched Guard troops to protect two South Florida nuclear power plants but not the Crystal River facility. The plant’s operator, Florida Power Corp., declined the governor’s offer of security, according to local news reports at the time.

Aides also say Bush’s server was secure because it was kept at the governor’s office.

But Johannes Ullrich, a cybersecurity expert who is dean of research at the SANS Technology Institute, said private accounts in general are more susceptible to attacks than government e-mail addresses, particularly attacks in which a hacker establishes a look-alike account that allows them to impersonate as the account holder.

Encryption technology was also far less sophisticated in 2001, he said, which could have made Bush’s e-mails particularly insecure while traveling. If hackers gained access to Bush’s account, he said, there’s a chance they could break into the account of the National Guard commander or other officials with whom Bush exchanged e-mails.

“The bigger issue here is, what else can an attacker do?” Ullrich said. “Now I may be able to penetrate a National Guard commander’s laptop by infecting it or by impersonating Jeb Bush’s account. . . . Now you may even be able to give the order to remove troops or change deployments.”

In recent days, Democrats - reeling from the criticism of Clinton’s e-mail practices - have stepped up their critique of Bush on the same topic, arguing that he used his personal e-mail to avoid public scrutiny of his actions as governor.

“The GOP presidential hopeful’s attacks on this issue are completely disingenuous, and there are still a litany of questions Republicans need to answer, like what e-mails has Jeb Bush not turned over?” said Holly Shulman, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.

Bush rebuffed such criticism during an event in New Hampshire on Friday. “I’m not surprised that the Clinton operatives would suggest this. It’s kind of standard operating procedure,” he told reporters, referring to Democratic charges that his e-mail situation was no different than Clinton’s.

He added later that he was “totally transparent. I have a BlackBerry as part of my official portrait, for crying out loud. There was nothing to hide.”

Under Florida law, Bush was required to hand over e-mails related to his time in office. Bush aides say there were about 550,000 e-mails on Bush’s server when he left office in 2007, although a portion of those came from before he began his tenure. About half that number were eventually turned over to state archives.

As noted Saturday by the New York Times, the archive process continued until last May, when attorneys for Bush delivered 25,000 additional messages. Aides have defended the pace of Bush’s compliance, saying that it took seven years because of his volume of correspondence.

In February, Bush launched a Web site, JebBushEmails.com, telling visitors that “they’re all here so you can read them and make up your own mind.”

Bush’s aides have strongly defended the process used to release his messages, noting that other potential GOP presidential candidates haven’t released any e-mails or are having e-mails released only as part of ongoing government investigations. The list includes former Texas governor Rick Perry; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Perry and Jindal have used private e-mail for government business, according to the Associated Press. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley (D) - who is also weighing a presidential bid - said last week that he used a private Gmail account as governor to communicate with aides and Cabinet officials.

When Bush published his e-mails in February, aides said many messages would be withheld or redacted to comply with state law barring the release of messages including Social Security numbers, confidential business issues or law enforcement and other security matters. Some of thepublished e-mails initially included Social Security numbers, forcing Bush’s team to quickly redact them - an early stumble for the governor’s fledgling presidential efforts.

A spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state’s office did not return a request for comment Saturday to explain why some e-mails were released and others withheld, saying any answer would require a fuller legal interpretation that wouldn’t be available until next week.

Bush’s archives include a handful of other messages from leaders of Florida’s National Guard. There are copies of the “Florida National Guard Activity Report” from August 2000 and December 2000, with information about troop deployments to the Caribbean, South Korea and Kuwait; the activation of units; and details on training exercises and drug seizures.

In October 2000, Harrison e-mailed Bush to remind him that 170 Florida Air National Guardsmen from Jacksonville would be deploying to Saudi Arabia to enforce the southern Iraq no-fly zone. The message said they would “coincidentally travel over with a group of 90 from the Texas Air National Guard” - a unit that was under the command of Bush’s brother, George W. Bush, who was then Texas governor.

The next month, a lieutenant commander with one of the deployed units e-mailed Jeb Bush to thank him for sending a message of support, noting that “our unit has played a key role in missions directly related” to ongoing tensions between Iraq and Israel.. The officer added that “you can assure your brother the F-15s from your state could take the F-16s from his state!”

Immediately after news broke March 2 about Clinton’s use of a private server, Bush faulted her for not releasing her e-mails from her time as secretary of state, writing on Twitter that “Transparency matters.” He later raised concerns about Clinton’s decision during an interview with Radio Iowa.

“For security purposes, you need to be behind a firewall that recognizes the world for what it is, and it’s a dangerous world, and security would mean that you couldn’t have a private server,” he said. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you, that didn’t come up in Secretary Clinton’s thought process.”

On Friday night, after a meeting with potential supporters, Bush was asked to respond to criticism that he, like Clinton, was allowed to self-select which e-mails should be turned over for archiving.

“I was way too busy to decide,” Bush said, before clarifying that his general counsel was among those involved in selecting which e-mails to turn over.

“It was a process that was based on the law itself, and we complied with the law and all during this time we’ve complied with the law, even in my post-governorship,” he said.

President Obama jokes about Clinton’s emails, Scott Walker and marijuana at Gridiron Club dinner (Washington Post)

By Ben Terris; Roxanne Roberts

March 15, 2015

Washington Post

Nine years after he made his Gridiron Club dinner debut as a fresh-faced young senator, President Obama took the podium again Saturday night, sounding wistful about the passage of time.

“Just a few years ago I could never imagine being in my 50s,” he mused. “And when it comes to my approval ratings, I still can’t.”

No, seriously, folks. Remember, he told the white-tie crowd of elite journalists, when he was considered the tech-savvy hipster in the executive mansion? But now, “Hillary has a server in her house!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t even know you could have one of those. I am so far behind.”

Only in Washington does this scene not necessarily strike people as strange: Hundreds of reporters hobnobbing with the government officials they normally cover in an evening of fine dining and parody songs that make Weird Al Yankovic seem hip. Oh, and even though it’s an event thrown by a group of journalists, guests are told not to spoil the fun by publishing anything.

But that’s the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner, a tradition of goofy skits, silly songs and music by the United States Marine Band that has remained virtually unchanged since 1885.The night, at its core, is unabashedly sentimental — the main objective is to promote “good fellowship.”

The president — speaking at the dinner for a third time as president, fourth time overall — told the room that Democrats had determined they needed to do better with older white voters.

“Which is why I’m here,” he said. He noted that if the crowd laughed at his jokes more than the last time he was around in 2013 there might be a reason for it.

“I’m not saying I’m any funnier,” he said. “I’m saying weed is now legal in D.C.”

[From 2013: President Obama at elite Gridiron Club jokes about sequester, Biden, Rubio]

The dinner is a love letter to a Washington that never really existed — a romanticized place where politicians, despite all the squabbling, share an abiding respect for each other, the press and the political process. If it was ever true, it’s certainly not now — but it’s must be nice to pretend for a few hours.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because on this night, when Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes a joke about Hillary Clinton, it’s not part of a future negative ad campaign.

“I really do have a lot of close friends who are Democrats,” said Walker, serving as the official Republican speaker for the evening. “ I even have Hillary’s private email. . . It’s HillaryClinton@Wallstreet.com. You know the best part of that joke, Elizabeth Warren wrote it for me.”

Big laughs all around, even though soon enough half the room will be out to get him. And it didn’t take long for someone to get retribution. But only jokingly of course.

“I’m sure Governor Walker has some really neat accomplishments,” said Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. “I mean, it’s literally been years since his own constituents tried to recall him.”

Obama got in on the Walker bashing a little too, but made sure to poke fun of himself in the process.

“[Walker] punted on the question of evolution, which I do think is a problem,” Obama said. “I absolutely believe in the theory of evolution — when it comes to gay marriage.”

With a guest list of 650 — a fraction the size of the much-hyped White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — Gridiron is arguably a far more coveted ticket within Beltway circles. Gridiron is also the most insular of the city’s press dinners. None of the speakers have to play to C-SPAN or CNN cameras, so they keep it for Washington, by Washington, with insider jokes designed for VIP political junkies who breathlessly parse every off-hand aside for hidden meaning.

And if that’s not you? Well, at least. . . .

“This is great people watching,” said Aneta Bazzie, a visitor here for an unrelated event — a conference of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials — as the crowd of famous-for-Washington types, dressed to the nines, paraded past her into the Washington Renaissance Hotel.

“Who’s that?” her friend Susan Gillette asked, pointing at Andrea Mitchell in a sparkling ball gown.

“Who’s that?” Bazzie asked about political scion/MSNBC personality Abby Huntsman. “You should write down she is wearing a nice dress.”

“Who’s that?” Gillette asked about Democratic ad maker Mark Putnam, and then about former Senator Ben Nelson, and then about Valerie Jarrett.

“Oh I know you!” Bazzie says running up to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, and pointing to her sweatshirt bearing the name of their shared home state. “We’re from West Virginia.” All politics is local.

It was Obama’s third appearance at Gridiron since becoming president; he originally seemed to avoid such Beltway traditions but seems to have raised his tolerance for them.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest broke away from a conversation with Politico reporter Mike Allen to head into the dinner. “It’ll be all right,” he predicted. “Everything’s in better form when the president’s here.”

He was joined by an array of guests that included Cabinet members, congressmen, diplomats; baseball legend Hank Aaron;, TV news personalities Wolf Blitzer, Gayle King and Chris Matthews; and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

“I’m just going to sit quietly and hope the president doesn’t notice me,” said possible Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. He was on his way to change into his tux in the gym, when the hotel’s general manager spotted him and gave him a free room for the evening.

Not at the dinner: Supposed 2016 frontrunners Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. (Walker joked that the Gridiron Club “couldn’t afford her.”)

But oh, she was present in spirit. The controversy over Clinton’s private email account is exactly the kind of personality-driven saga that Gridiron loves to mock in its ever-corny song skits. To the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” naturally:

Oh the muckrackers’ll rake, rake, rake, rake, rake

Harvard law professors’ bleeding hearts will ache

Don’t need you so I’ll take, take, take, take, take

Take you out, take you out.

Or at least that’s what we’re told they did. One of the many peculiarities of the event is that the 65 members of Gridiron represent some of the most influential editors and political reporters in the nation’s capital — and yet the dinner is closed to the press who would cover it. Which means this story, as always, is cobbled together from a viewing of the dress rehearsal, glimpses of the script, transcripts from helpful staffers and the damp cocktail-napkin scribblings of sympathetic guests.

The skits are a mixture of hokey and slick, the journalists dressed in elaborate costumes but often bolstered by strong-voiced ringers for the song parodies. There were male reporters playing Colombian prostitutes in a Secret Service skit. There were puns and bad jokes but nothing damning: The same reporters who appear on Sunday morning talk shows decrying the letter GOP senators sent to Iran had nothing to say about it on stage.

That fell to the president. “You don’t diminish your office by taking a selfie,” he said. “You do it by sending a poorly written letter to Iran. Really. That wasn’t a joke.”

The humor can be broad. There was a skit portraying the massive field of Republican presidential aspirants, all dressed in marathon garb: Rick Perry was portrayed as a dunce, Ben Carson insane, Rand Paul an overreaching know-it-all, Scott Walker a drop-out, Rick Santorum an egomaniac, Mike Huckabee an opportunist, and Jeb Bush as a guy saddled with an unfortunate moniker (sung to the Wizard of Oz’s “If I Only Had a Brain”):

“No matter what a man inherits

You should judge him on the merits

Not his much too famous name

Just because he’s presumin’

That he could be a new man

If he had another name.”

And the Koch brothers were portrayed as ultimate king makers (to the classic Coke commercial tune):

“We’d like to buy the world for Koch

There’s a billion we will spend

We pay to play in the USA

So freedom doesn’t end.”

The midterm shellacking of the Democrats was mocked with Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere”:

“We lost everywhere, man

We lost everywhere, man

Not just out Senate lair, man

We did not have a prayer, man

We’re in need of some repair, man

We lost everywhere.”

Are you beginning to get the picture? There were nods to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, gay marriage, the Secret Service and McAuliffe, who was called “most ambitious man alive” in a song poking his quest for higher office (to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop”):

“Don’t stop thinking about McAuliffe

He’d stop at nothing to win

His whole life, American dream

National race his ultimate scheme.”

But as any politician will tell you, it’s better to be mocked than ignored. (Oddly, no mention of Marco Rubio, despite what looks like a serious campaign ramp-up. And Bobby Jindal? We hardly knew ye.) There was, as always, a toast to the president and the entire room linking arms and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” A fantasy, like Cinderella’s, that always ends by midnight.

 

President Obama jokes about Peril, promise of Clinton candidacy both on display lately (Associated Press)

By Nancy Benac

March 15, 2015

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — All the peril and promise of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s expected presidential campaign played out in high relief this past week.

In one hour, really.

There she was, in her element, enjoying a hero’s welcome at a U.N. conference on women. Cellphone cameras snapped away as she spoke with passion of women’s rights as the “great unfinished business of the 21st century.”

And there she was, a half-hour later, in her own personal hell just down the hall, carefully fending off questions from reporters asking about secrecy, ethics and whether she had played by the rules as secretary of state in using a private email account and server.

“I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by,” she insisted without apology, in a deja vu moment that revived memories of all too many Clinton dramas past.

The back-to-back events showcased the past vs. future tug of war that could be a prominent dynamic of Clinton’s campaign: the years of accumulated baggage versus the historic prospect of electing the first woman president.

For better or worse, Clinton has a long history with voters — two decades of triumph and travail related to her time as first lady, senator, failed presidential candidate and secretary of state.

In all its incarnations, the Bill-and-Hillary show has had more than its share of theatrics. While younger voters missed much of the show — Whitewater, travelgate, Monica Lewinsky and much more — the past looms large in Clinton’s profile.

But Clinton’s candidacy also dangles the making of history, the ultimate fulfillment of that “great unfinished business” for women of which she spoke at the U.N.

The mostly female audience at the conference was practically giddy to be in Clinton’s presence and burst into applause when her introducer mentioned the presence of “a future president” in the room.

Clinton does not discourage such talk.

At a forum with Democratic women earlier in the month, she looked out over those in the crowd and asked if they hoped to see more women run for offices such as school board, governor, mayor, member of Congress.

“I suppose it’s only fair to say,” she added coyly, “don’t you someday want to see a woman president?”

Clinton had hoped to spend much of March promoting her work on women’s issues. But that theme largely has been overshadowed by the email controversy and questions about the propriety of the Clinton Foundation accepting foreign contributions when she was secretary of state and after she left the Obama administration.

At 67, it will be a challenge for her to give off the “new car smell” that President Barack Obama once famously said American voters want.

Republican pollster David Winston said the idea of a female president holds obvious appeal but can only be taken so far.

“It gives her an opportunity to be listened to that will be helpful to her,” says Winston, “but she’s got to do something with that opportunity.”

Likewise, the idea of the first black president was a powerful part of Obama’s winning 2008 campaign but had limited impact in the end.

In exit polls, just 9 percent of 2008 voters said race was an important factor in their choice for president.

Andy Kohut, founding director of the Pew Research Center, said the Clintons — and they are largely viewed as a package deal — offer both dynamism and the risk of “Clinton fatigue,” from all the years of charges and allegations.

“There are so many parts to the puzzle,” he said. “They’re complicated people.”

If the past few weeks have proved anything, it’s that it will be challenging for Hillary Clinton to steer the conversation around all that and in a forward-looking direction.

“The thing about having baggage is that it’s something you always have to manage,” Winston says. “What she’s got to do, and she obviously struggled with it this week, is how do you manage it in such a way that it allows you to say the things you want to say?”

Clinton is expected to announce her candidacy within the next month. Aides think she will be able to more nimbly respond to controversies once she has a full campaign apparatus in place.

At the U.N., before giving her response to the email controversy, Clinton took a moment to speak to reporters about gender equity and tell them that despite progress, “when it comes to the full participation of women and girls, we’re just not there yet.”

If it takes her own presidency to lead the way, she had to be thinking, all the better.

 

Hillary’s meritocracy problem: The GOP will paint her as an elitist — and the right can make that charge stick (Salon)

By Bill Curry

March 15, 2015

Salon

 

Things were looking bleak for Walter Mondale on the 1984 day I dropped in on one of his top aides to critique his performance. The brilliant Paul Tully listened to this politically-minded nuclear freeze activist for as long as he could bear, then slammed his fist on his desk so hard the drawers rattled “Bill!” he screamed at me. “I can change everything but the candidate!”

 

Many Democrats this week are hoping Tully is wrong and that an experienced politician of deeply ingrained habits might change, either on her own or with some outside help. The debate over Hillary Clinton’s email is also a debate about every concern Democrats harbor about their frontrunner. The way the questions have been posed — can she change? must she change — means they never go anywhere.

 

As framed by a facile media and D.C. political class, these questions are about as useful as the endless chatter before a Super Bowl about whether a quarterback or coach needs “to the win the big one” in order to “secure his legacy.” So much of the talk is cosmetic. Some say that Hillary needs to adjust her personality: She must take criticism better, accept more responsibility, smile at the press. Others talk horserace, believing that a real campaign structure, the right consultant or an open-for-business Clinton war room will stem the attacks.

 

Few mention any need to change policy – for example, her faith on global capitalism, or her fondness for military intervention. And for all the talk of Hillaryworld dysfunction, no one challenges her campaign’s basic model of mortgaging itself to the status quo to raise the billion dollars it costs to gather the demographics and pay the consultants to craft the empty ads it takes to win.

 

Hillary’s most avid fans say she doesn’t have to change a thing. Her spin is that all’s well. The race hasn’t started yet. Voters aren’t paying attention; those who are don’t care; those who care are Fox News voters she wouldn’t win over anyway. This is a tempest in a Tea Party, a tiny flame lit by the far right and fanned by a Clinton-hating news media. She did nothing illegal or wrong. There was no real issue — and if there was one, the steps she took to address it were more than adequate. Case closed.

 

Polls support her on that. A Pew survey this week found just 17 percent of respondents followed the email story closely. Most were old—just 4 percent of the under-30 crowd said they were interested—and set in their ways. Forty-four percent of conservative Republicans were apparently glued to their screens. In other polls Hillary’s support held steady.

 

But we take all polls too literally. It’s hard to capture a softening of resolve or the emergence of doubt in a survey. The problem for Hillary is that her issues run deeper than this.

 

The week before the email story broke Hillary pocketed $300,000 for a Silicon Valley speech she gave to “women in technology.” Her campaign—no matter what the pundits say, and however she may pay for it, she has one—spun it as a preview of her 2016 ‘message.’ If so, she has a mountain of work to do. A month after the president struck a new and widely applauded populist chord in his State of the Union, Clinton managed to sound like the old consensus-seeking Obama. She actually vowed to restore bipartisanship in words so corny it hurt to hear them: “I’d like to bring people from right, left, red, blue, get them into a nice warm purple space where everybody is talking and where we’re actually trying to solve problems.”

 

She recited the usual Democratic economic litany but took care not to offend the odd technology billionaire who might be listening. Given the venue, one might expect as much, but weeks later she offered up the same riff, worse actually, at an Emily’s List gala where she called for a “new participation age” and for America to “help more people start small businesses and invest in the…entrepreneurs that will create the new jobs of tomorrow.” Also, Hillary said she’d cut “red tape.”

 

The Emily’s List audience was worshipful and Hillary tried her hardest to be more spontaneous and “real.” That meant two lame pantsuit jokes, another about her hair and one about the color of that Internet dress. Talking about Sen. Barbara Mikulski she said, “We have to work out macro issues and also macaroni and cheese issues … for hardworking families they’re one and the same.” Listening to it all a second time, I felt bad for her.

 

Her worst performance was the 20-minute press conference she held at the U.N. to take a very few, selected questions about her emails. It was a strange venue for lots of reasons, not least among them that she has still to explain her 2009 order to U.S. diplomats to spy on other diplomats, including U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. You’d think it the wrong place to plead the right to privacy. Her team bet it was the right place to cut short a media availability and they bet right.

 

The event has been criticized for everything from how long she waited to hold it to how quickly it unraveled and even its crazily discordant Guernica backdrop. Two of the criticisms matter. The first is that in delivering a masterpiece of syntactical elusion Clinton never conceded making a mistake of any kind.  The second is that she seemed to think none of the issues raised had any validity.

 

She’s wrong. The issues raised are not only valid but vital. Both our right to privacy and our right to know what our government does in our name are under assault. Politicians of both parties promise to safeguard and even expand these rights, but with each passing year our government knows more about us and we know less about it. At stake is our very autonomy as persons and as citizens.

 

The issue of transparency looms largest in matters of foreign and defense policy. The harm done our nation and the world under cloak of state secrecy is beyond measure. What we do in the open makes us proud; from the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift to the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. It’s what we do in secret that shames us, whether overthrowing and assassinating elected leaders in Guatemala, Congo and Iran to condoning mass bribery and spying on our own allies. The way to fix American foreign policy is to take it public. If we’ve learned anything in the last week it’s that Hillary doesn’t understand or believe that.

 

When Clinton does what no other cabinet officer dared do and then offers an excuse as flimsy and annoying as her convenience, she plays into an image that could be her undoing. It’s not the shadowy, secretive Clinton narrative the media loves to push. It’s the true story of the new American oligarchs who play by separate rules; who live privileged lives to which they feel entitled and who condescend to the less educated and prosperous whose expressions of democratic will they trust far less than their own expert knowledge.

 

Making charges of elitism stick is what Republicans do best. Think about it. Three times they were able to persuade voters that some poor Democratic sap—first Michael Dukakis, then Al Gore, then John Kerry–was more elitist than the Bushes.  It didn’t help that Dukakis was buttoned down, that Gore was stiff or that Kerry spent a lifetime cultivating the very accent the Bushes worked so hard to shed, but Republicans are good at this. Hillary reminds us of the flaws of her 2008 campaign but also of the ghosts of every losing Democratic presidential candidate of the last 30 years.

 

It isn’t just the Republicans’ flair for dividing us that makes this such a problem. America struggles under a failed meritocracy. Jefferson dreamed of a meritocracy — but not one that flocked to Wall Street or that took more than it gave. Nor did he dream of a country that rewarded its elites so richly that integrity and hard work would no longer ensure a decent life for everyone else.

 

Hillary knows how to give a populist-sounding speech. In 2008 she died two political deaths before her resurrection as an economic populist, of all things. She’d do well to recall that from then on she outpolled Obama by 400,000 votes. If she’d run that way from the start, she’d have likely won. This time she can’t afford even one political death. If she falters in a primary, she’s toast.

 

Clinton can’t truly change her message or even her style without changing her policies and the very business model of her campaign. Can she do it? This much seems clear: In a political vacuum, she won’t even try. If she’s not challenged, she’ll see no real reason for it. And if no real primary competition emerges, it will be up to progressives to apply the necessary pressure. We need to establish our own bottom line, to galvanize a strong movement to support it, and not back down.

 

All who would protect Clinton from such competition do her no favors — and the country a great disservice.

 

Hillary Clinton Spokesman: We Did Read Each Email (The Wall Street Journal)

By Laura Meckler

March 15, 2015

The Wall Street Journal

 

Hillary Clinton has taken a lot of hits over her decision to exclusively use a personal email account for her work as secretary of state. Among them: that in deciding which of the emails to turn over to the State Department, and which to withhold, nobody opened and read each email.

 

That was the conclusion that some reporters and experts drew from a nine-page fact sheet from Mrs. Clinton’s office, which lays out the process she used in detail. Nowhere in that description does it say that the emails were individually reviewed. Rather, it describes a series of searches—using keywords and the names of public officials, for instance—used to figure out which emails were related to her work.

 

Now a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton says that in fact, each email was individually reviewed.

 

“Every email was reviewed,” spokesman Nick Merrill said in an email. In an attempt to clear up any confusion, he added: “What was in the fact sheet were examples of techniques used by the reviewers to double and triple check they were capturing everything. This was NOT in lieu of reading them all, was in ADDITION to reading them all. We did not mean to imply otherwise.”

 

There has, in fact, been confusion on this point, because the fact sheet made no mention of anyone reading the emails. Several publications wrote pieces saying that nobody in Mrs. Clinton’s team read through all the emails. Some argued that it was easy to imagine emails relevant to Mrs. Clinton’s official duties that could remain uncaptured by searching on names and keywords.

 

Federal law puts the responsibility on individuals to decide which of their documents are federal records that must be preserved. Mrs. Clinton’s office said that in making decisions, she erred “on the side of including anything that might potentially be a federal record.”

The Clinton fact sheet laid out the process in some detail. It said she began with 62,320 emails during the four years she was in office and said Mrs. Clinton asked her attorneys to sort through the account and figure out what needed to be turned over to the State Department after officials there requested the emails last year.

 

The fact sheet said that first, her attorneys pulled out those that had a government email address in any address field. That yielded 27,500 emails, which were designated official communications.

 

Then, searching among the other emails, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers looked for names of government and other officials, including close aides. They also sorted addresses by sender and recipient to look for email addresses that weren’t obviously official.

 

Finally, they did a keyword search of the emails without government addresses, using terms such as “Benghazi” and “Libya,” which presumably would have retrieved any emails about the attack on the diplomatic post there. Through those additional steps, the attorneys found 2,900 additional emails that were considered official.

 

It didn’t mention an email-by-email review.

 

Some experts interviewed by the Wall Street Journal found the approach described in the fact sheet—which didn’t mention reading every email—acceptable. Others found it lacking.

 

Jason R. Baron, former director of litigation at the National Archives, said the method described by the Clinton fact sheet wasn’t robust enough to guarantee that official emails were retained, and her team should have reviewed all emails individually.

 

“You would have to do a line-by-line review to see if any sentence was related to government business,” said Mr. Baron, who is now an attorney at Drinker Biddle & Reath. “If any portion of the document is related to government business, then it’s a federal record.”

 

By contrast, Jan Baran, an elections and ethics attorney who represents Republicans, said Mrs. Clinton’s approach appeared to be reasonable, presuming her team included all emails produced by their searches.

 

“That is a reasonable standard approach to finding documents,” he said. He said it isn’t customary to read each email individually.

 

In the end, Mrs. Clinton gave the State Department copies of 30,490 emails last year, and she determined that 31,830 other emails were personal. She said she “chose not to keep” the personal messages, implying they were deleted.

 

A timeline of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail saga  (The Washington Post)

By Glenn Kessler

March 15, 2015

The Washington Post

 

“When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal e-mail account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails instead of two.”

- Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, March 10, 2015

Given the interest in Clinton’s e-mail arrangements as secretary, as a reader service, the Fact Checker has compiled an extensive timeline concerning government rules and regulations on the use of private e-mail accounts and her actions.

The timeline shows that before she became secretary, the State Department made clear that certain e-mail records should be retained and that official communication systems were preferred.

During Clinton’s term as secretary, regulations were tightened concerning the preservation of e-mail records, and concerns were raised about the use of personal e-mail accounts for official business. But the legal requirement to immediately preserve e-mails from nongovernment e-mail accounts was not made mandatory until nearly two years after she stepped down.

1950: President Truman signs into law the Federal Records Act, which establishes the records-management responsibilities of government officials.

Oct. 30, 1995: The State Department Foreign Affairs manual is updated to reflect the emergence of something called “electronic mail.” The manual notes: “All employees must be aware that some of the variety of the messages being exchanged on E-mail are important to the Department and must be preserved; such messages are considered Federal records under the law.”

The manual then described how to determine which e-mails are such federal records, giving as examples: “Records that document the formulation and execution of basic policies and decisions and the taking of necessary actions; records that document important meetings; records that facilitate action by agency officials and their successors in office.”

The manual also says that it is up to officials themselves to determine which e-mails should be considered federal records: “E-mail message creators and recipients must decide whether a particular message is appropriate for preservation.”

Nov. 4, 2005: The State Department updates the Foreign Affairs manual to state that “sensitive but unclassified” information should not be transmitted through personal e-mail accounts. “It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized AIS [Automated Information System], which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information,” the manual says.

Jan. 13, 2009: Clintonemail.com domain name is registered to a person named Justin Cooper, a senior adviser to former president Bill Clinton. (He then signs it over to a company called Perfect Privacy LLC, which offers private domain registration.) Hillary Clinton begins her confirmation hearings the same day.

Jan. 21, 2009: The Senate confirms Clinton as secretary of state.

Oct. 2, 2009: The U.S. Code of federal regulations on handling electronic records is updated: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” The responsibility for making and preserving the records is assigned to “the head of each federal agency.”

June 29, 2011: A State Department cable to employees is issued under Clinton’s signature (as are all cables) after Google revealed that hackers were targeting the personal e-mail accounts of U.S. government employees. The cable warns: “Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.”

August 2012: The State Department inspector general issues a scathing report on the performance of U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration that includes criticism of the fact that he used a private e-mail account to handle “sensitive but unclassified” material. Gration is later fired.

“The Ambassador’s requirements for use of commercial e-mail in the office and his flouting of direct instructions to adhere to Department policy have placed the information management staff in a conundrum: balancing the desire to be responsive to their mission leader and the need to adhere to Department regulations and government information security standards,” the IG report said.

Feb. 1, 2013: Clinton steps down as secretary of state.

March 15, 2013: Clinton’s private e-mail account is first exposed after a hacker named “Guccifer” accessed the account of former Bill Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. The hack shows that Clinton communicated with Blumenthal using the private e-mail account of hdr22@clintonemail.com, and Guccifer published a screen grab of their exchanges showing that the two discussed a number of sensitive foreign policy issues.

The leak attracted little attention at the time, though an article in Gawker asked, “Why was Clinton apparently receiving e-mails at a non-governmental e-mail account?” John Cook, the author, added: “Neither the State Department nor the White House would immediately comment on whether the White House knew that Blumenthal was digitally whispering in Clinton’s ear, or if the e-mails were preserved as the law requires.”

Cook in 2015 said that Gawker filed a Freedom of Information request for copies of the e-mails, citing the specific e-mail address, but was told by State no records existed.

Sept. 9, 2013: The National Archives updates regulations on the handling of e-mails and federal records: “While agency employees should not generally use personal e-mail accounts to conduct official agency business, there may be times when agencies authorize the use of personal e-mail accounts, such as in emergency situations when Federal accounts are not accessible or when an employee is initially contacted through a personal account.”

Summer 2014: State Department officials responding to a request for documents from the House Select Committee on Benghazi realize there are no records to or from an official State Department e-mail account for Clinton.

Nov. 14, 2014: President Obama signs an update of the 1950 Presidential and Federal Records Act. The law expanded the definition of “federal records” to specifically include electronic communications. The law also clarified the responsibilities of federal government officials when they use nongovernment e-mail systems, which includes copying an official record or forwarding a complete copy of the e-mail within 20 days of transmission.

December 2014: In response to a request from the State Department, Clinton provides 50,000 pages of printed e-mails. The Department provides 900 pages related to Benghazi to the House committee in February.

March 4, 2015: Clinton tweets: “I want the public to see my email. I have asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

March 10, 2015: Clinton tells reporters that she set up the system because she did not want to carry two devices - one for work e-mail and one for personal e-mail. She says she turned more than 30,490 work-related e-mails over to the State Department and deleted 31,830 e-mails that she deemed to be personal.

 

State Dept. email archiving process puts Clinton on the spot (CNN)

By Kevin Bohn

March 14, 2015

CNN

 

The State Department only last month started automatically preserving dozens of high-level officials’ emails, according to a department spokeswoman, a revelation that comes amid the controversy surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s own email use.

 

This is key because Clinton, in her news conference on Tuesday to answer questions about why she exclusively used a private email address to communicate during her tenure, told reporters she’d thought her communications to senior department officials were always saved. That’s an important point, given legal requirements for preserving federal records.

 

“In meeting the record-keeping obligations, it was my practice to email government officials on their State or dot-gov accounts so that the emails were immediately captured and preserved,” she said.

 

The news about the State Department’s archiving practices -- and the change that started in February -- could refuel the furor of Republicans over Clinton’s choice to not use her government email account, to have a private server in her family home house her emails, and to decide (with her staff) which emails to delete and which to turn over to the State Department for review.

 

Rep. Susan Brooks, a member of the select committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, said in the Republicans’ weekly media address Saturday, “You see, right now there is no way for us to know whether we have all of the State Department communications that rightfully belong to the American people.”

 

“The only way to truly know is by having access to Secretary Clinton’s personal server,” the Indiana Republican added. “We are asking Secretary Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral, third-party arbiter. After a complete inventory, this arbiter can make a determination as to which emails should be public and which should remain private. These decisions would be completely impartial and independent.”

 

So far, Brooks’ committee had gotten just under 300 of Clinton’s emails from the State Department.

 

Last year, as it was trying to update its records, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for nonpersonal emails from their personal accounts that could be work-related.

 

That request prompted Clinton to turn over 30,490 emails -- about 55,000 pages. Clinton has asked for those emails to be made public, and department officials are reviewing them to make sure no sensitive information is released.

 

Clinton’s office had said her account contained 62,320 sent and received emails from March 2009 to February 2013.

 

“About half were personal that were not in any way related to work. I had no reason to save them,” Clinton said at her press conference.

 

The fact that all emails from senior officials weren’t automatically saved until recently doesn’t mean they are gone, according to the State Department.

 

“I wouldn’t state it’s lost to history, because there are always -- there are technical means of gaining access to past information,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday.

 

At the same time, Psaki said the State Department chose to change its approach -- by automatically saving all emails -- “because it’s an imperfect system.”

 

“This is a more efficient and better way,” she said of the new system. “But, obviously, there were ways to preserve (emails), and employees and individuals were expected to do that prior to this new process.”

 

Separately, Psaki said that a letter was recently sent to former State Department staffers asking for their help in the preservation effort.

 

“If they should become aware ... of federal record in their possession -- such as an email sent or received on a personal email account while (they were) serving in their official capacity at the Department -- that ... record (should) be made available to the Department,” Psaki said the ex-staffers were told.

 

Even before last month’s chance, emails of current Secretary of State John Kerry, who uses a government address, were already being saved automatically.

 

GOP to Clinton: Hand over your email server (CBS News)

By Reena Flores

March 14, 2015

CBS News

 

Republicans are casting a wider net in their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address during her time as secretary of state.

 

In the GOP’s weekly address Saturday, Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks, who is a member of the House Select Committee in charge of scrutinizing the events leading up to the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, is calling for Clinton to pass on the actual email server that hosted her private address, rather than just copies of the relevant electronic messages.

 

“Right now there is no way for us to know whether we have all of the State Department communications that rightfully belong to the American people. The only way to truly know is by having access to Secretary Clinton’s personal server,” Brooks said in a new video. “That is why we are asking Secretary Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral, third-party arbiter.”

 

Citing the need for the surveyor to be “completely impartial and independent,” Brooks also called on a third party to sift through the thousands of pages accumulated over Clinton’s tenure in President Obama’s Cabinet.

 

“After a complete inventory, this arbiter can make a determination as to which emails should be public and which should remain private,” the Indiana congresswoman said. “By handing her server over to a neutral, third-party arbiter, Secretary Clinton can help us move forward with figuring out what happened to our people.”

 

What this “independent” arbiter might look like is still anyone’s guess. While South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House Select Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham have said they’ve lost confidence in the State Department to make determinations about what should be made public, no formal steps have been announced for another lawyer or federal judge to handle the matter.

 

A neutral third-party is not entirely unheard of, but the appearance of politicizing the results could be detrimental to the integrity of the investigation itself.

 

The House Select Committee issued a subpoena for Clinton’s emails last week following the original email revelations. The subpoena asked for “all communications of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to Libya and to the State Department for other individuals who have information pertinent to the investigation,” according to a committee statement.

 

“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Gowdy said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” unsatisfied with the emails his committee has received.

 

The subpoena drew the wrath of several Democrats on the Benghazi committee, who called the move “completely unnecessary and unfounded.”

 

“You rushed to issue a unilateral subpoena to Secretary Clinton with no debate, no vote and no deliberation whatsoever by committee members,” a letter from committee Democrats to Gowdy read.

 

House Democrats’ quick defense of Clinton assured Gowdy that the former secretary was in full cooperation with the federal standards existing at the time.

 

But conservative groups are not the only ones seeking this information. Though Mr. Obama has staunchly defended Clinton’s record as a Cabinet member, veterans of the Democratic Party like California Sen. Dianne Feinstein have deemed Clinton’s secrecy on the matter damaging to a potential 2016 run for the White House.

 

“From this point on ... the silence is going to hurt her,” Feinstein said last week. “She is the leading candidate, whether it be Republican or Democrat, to be the next president.”

 

The Associated Press is additionally suing the State Department over the email controversy. The news agency filed a lawsuit last week in an attempt to force the release of Clinton’s email correspondence, after repeated attempts to secure that information from numerous failed U.S. Freedom of Information Act requests.

 

In the meantime, the State Department’s own review of Clinton’s emails is only in the first phases of an appraisal that could take “several months.”

 

Despite the directives from Clinton to the State Department instructing a release of unclassified information, Republicans aren’t wavering in their criticism of the former first lady.

 

“It was not out of a sense of transparency that she acted,” Brooks charged in her address. “It was our select committee’s oversight that compelled Secretary Clinton to hand over some of her e-mails.”

 

Mr. Obama, in his own address this week, urged the nation to support a new “Student Aid Bill of Rights.”

 

“It’s a simple declaration of values - what I call a Student Aid Bill of Rights,” the president said in a video. “It says that every student deserves access to a quality, affordable education. Every student should be able to access the resources to pay for college. Every borrower has the right to an affordable repayment plan. And every borrower has the right to quality customer service, reliable information and fair treatment, even if they struggle to repay their loans.”

 

The president, who used a visit to Georgia Tech earlier this week to speak on the need for higher education accessibility, also asked Americans to sign a declaration stating those principles of affordable schooling and reasonable loan plans.

 

The nation’s chief executive asserted his own steadfast support of higher education and also said that he would take the issue to members of Congress, as well as to leaders in the private sector.

 

“Making sure that students aren’t saddled with debt before they even get started in life is in all our interests,” the president said.

Hillary Clinton Seeks to Reassure Democrats on Email Controversy (The New York Times)

By Maggie Haberman

March 14, 2015

The New York Times

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton was not speaking to reporters when she gave her 21-minute news conference this week about her State Department emails. She was talking to Democratic supporters and seeking to assure them that the controversy could be easily explained.

 

With the Sunday news shows expected to begin a second week of focus on Mrs. Clinton’s emails, her allies say that, as rusty as she was when she took reporters’ questions at the United Nations, she accomplished her mission: giving Democrats something, anything, that would explain her actions.

 

Her late-night Twitter message a week earlier, publicly calling for the State Department to release her emails, merely raised more questions. Democrats who sought talking points were in the dark, as her growing group of advisers, including John Podesta, according to several people involved in the response effort, had said she needed to address it more forcefully.

 

The news conference Tuesday left many critics largely unsatisfied and clamoring for more. But Democratic voters were the the ones she hoped to reach.

 

“She doesn’t have to convince everybody, she just has to convince most people,” said Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist. “Most people have a reasonable test: Do you reasonably think that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, conducted herself with integrity and leadership and used a Blackberry with her personal address?”

 

Ms. Rosen added, “I think that she passed that test last week.”

 

She pointed to the vacuum that currently exists within the party in terms of a challenger — even those few Democrats considering contesting her have barely touched the email story — and said the media is filling it.

 

“I don’t think this story is the press’s fault by any means; I do think the press has turned itself into a checks and balances,” she said. “That’s going to be a fact of life through this primary.”

 

Mrs. Clinton is no stranger to addressing controversy in public. Her history is rife with examples of scandals, real or contrived, that were punctuated by belated efforts to tamp them down. When she ran for the United States Senate in 2000 from New York, she sparked a firestorm when she nodded along as Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, accused Israelis of poisoning Palestinian children. She later said the simultaneous translation had been off.

 

That moment, which occurred in November 1999, drove news cycles in the pre-social-media era, and troubled Jewish voters enough that Mrs. Clinton spent a fair amount of time reassuring potential constituents well into 2000. By Election Day, it was a distant memory.

Clinton’s control issues  (The Washington Post)

By Kathleen Parker

March 15, 2015

The Washington Post

 

On March 2, the story broke that Hillary Clinton had possibly violated e-mail regulations while secretary of state.

You could almost hear the collective gasp in Washington: Oh, no, here we go again.

But the next evening, Clinton was feted at the Emily’s List 30th-anniversary gala dinner as though nothing had happened. Only the trumpets were missing from what felt like her coronation as the Democratic presidential nominee and, possibly, the next president of the United States.

Fast-forward a dozen days and Clinton’s position in the presidential sweepstakes seems less assured, her inevitability not so inevitable.

The most perplexing question isn’t about the e-mails themselves but why she put everything at risk over such a small detail, declining to segregate her personal and business e-mail.

There can only be one answer, and it isn’t “convenience,” as Clinton claims. Think of another word that begins with the letter “C”: control.

Clinton claims she opted for the convenience of one cellphone and a personal server - rather than use a government-issued phone for business and another device for personal matters. Too much stuff to lug around?

So the whole question of her conduct as secretary of state boils down to a few ounces of electronic equipment. Hate to say it, but only a woman could come up with such an excuse. It’s all about the purse.

Plainly, Clinton didn’t want anyone snooping around her virtual file cabinet. Who does? But this isn’t the point. When you are secretary of state and are mulling a run for president, you steer clear of anything and anyone remotely questionable. No one should know this better.

Questions that merit serious consideration include whether the Clinton server was secure. Clinton insists that it was because her New York home, where the server lives, is protected by the Secret Service. Given the optional sobriety of agents these days, this is less than reassuring. Then, too, hacking doesn’t require on-site handling.

Here’s the real muddle for Clinton. Whether her server suffered no breaches - and whether there’s nothing in those 32,000 deleted personal e-mails - matters little. In politics, you’re guilty as perceived. It looks bad.

Most likely this error (rather than crime) is a function of remoteness more than dishonesty. The Clintons have been around so long, they are the essence of bubble life. Removed from the hubbub of ordinary existence - escorted, driven, valeted, catered to, styled, fluffed and obeyed - being Clinton means never having to hear the word “no.” It must be easy to forget that you have to live by the same rules as everyone else.

This is a concept the Clintons have never fully accepted. One can understand, given their extended public life - and the hyper-scrutiny under which they live - that they might seek to erect high walls around their private lives. Fame and celebrity breed not just insularity but also paranoia.

Maybe there’s nothing of interest in those personal e-mails, but how would we know? Team Clinton handpicked the “personals” and now they’re deleted, thus creating the impression that she is hiding something. The Clintons always seem to be hiding something. Not so much holding their cards close to the chest as kicking the body back behind the dust ruffle.

Even though investigations into every “gate” associated with them in the past - Travelgate, Filegate, Troopergate, you-name-it-gate - failed to produce much more than a blue dress, there seemed to be something not quite right. And now there’s this. Not illegal per se but not quite right.

Clinton says she figured that, because all her communications to State Department staff went to the dot-gov server, they automatically would have gone into storage as required. True, but what about the rest? What’s in those deleted e-mails? Don’t we imagine that personal and business often overlap in the Clinton Rolodex?

Adding to the suspicion is that the 55,000 pages of e-mails that Clinton did turn over to the State Department surfaced only after the House select committee investigating Benghazi requested her correspondence about the attack. Would she have turned them over anyway?

Maybe. Still and again, it doesn’t look good. And the entire mess serves as a reminder of a movie we’ve seen before - and it wasn’t so great the first time. Whether this episode proves fatal remains to be seen, but we won’t hear the end of it until every note of condolence, yoga date and wedding plan is known to someone other than Hillary.

Clinton easily beats any rivals in poll  (Los Angeles Times)

By David Lauter

March 15, 2015

Los Angeles Times

 

Hillary Rodham Clinton is not only the best-known but also the most favorably viewed of the potential presidential candidates from either of the two major parties, according to a new Gallup poll.

The poll was conducted Monday through Wednesday, mostly after the news broke about Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of State, but before the news conference last week in which she addressed the issue.

Roughly 9 in 10 Americans said they knew enough about Clinton to have an opinion, and the poll released Thursday found that 50% viewed her favorably, while 39% had a negative impression. On both counts, that put her in better position than any of the potential Republican candidates at this early stage of the presidential race.

But Clinton’s favorability has declined since she left the State Department, as Americans have begun to see her again as a presidential candidate rather than in the less political role as the nation’s top diplomat. When she left the agency, about two-thirds of Americans polled had a favorable view of her, a number that has dropped steadily as partisanship has taken its toll.

Last June, when Clinton released her book “Hard Choices,” 54% of Americans in a Gallup survey had a favorable view. Comparing that number with the latest figure indicates that the email controversy had not had a significant impact on the public’s perception of Clinton when the new poll was taken.

Among the Republican hopefuls, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were the best-known, with about two-thirds of respondents holding opinions on them.

But in Bush’s case, that opinion was closely divided -- 35% favorable and 33% unfavorable. Christie stood in a worse position, with negative perceptions outweighing the positive, 34% to 31%.

Among the potential contenders for the Republican nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida had the highest net favorability, with 26% holding a positive view and 21% a negative one, the poll found. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also had a net favorable rating, but was somewhat less known, with 20% favorable and 18% unfavorable.

The least popular Republican candidates overall were former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the two Texans considering running -- former Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Ted Cruz. For Santorum, negative views outnumbered positives, 27% to 20%; for Perry it was 32% to 25%, and for Cruz, 28% to 22%.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who some have hoped will challenge Clinton, had a net positive rating, but was far less known than Clinton. The poll showed 22% viewing her favorably and 19% unfavorably. Warren has repeatedly said she is not running and has taken no steps toward starting a campaign.

The Gallup survey questioned 1,522 U.S. adults by land lines and cellphones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

 

Will April bring shower of announcements? (The Hill)

By Cameron Joseph

March 14, 2015

The Hill

 

Get ready for April to bring a shower of presidential campaign announcements.

 

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) is moving hard towards a launch early next month, according to sources close to her team.

 

Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Ky.) are also likely to hit the launch button in the coming weeks, according to sources familiar with their plans, pushing the 2016 race into high gear in what could be a crucial month of the campaign season.

And, like most things in politics, the rush to launch is being driven mostly by finances.

 

April 1 marks the beginning of a new fundraising quarter, giving candidates plenty of time to build their campaign war chests before they have to report the figures publicly in July.

 

“It makes sense to start as early as possible to have a strong quarter. The financial challenge is so immense that you need all the time you can get,” said Texas-based GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak.

 

“It seems like it’s early, but as you start planning your calendar out for the rest of the year, you realize we’re a ways down the road here and you’ve got to do the things you have to do now,” he added.

 

Several candidates appear ready to take advantage an early announcement, giving them the full second quarter to pad their campaign coffers.

 

The exact timing of Clinton’s decision remains an open question, though it appears increasingly likely that she’ll move in early April.

 

Cruz is also expected to announce sometime early in the month, while Paul has been eying April 7 as a possible launch date for some time.

 

Cruz and Paul aides declined to comment to The Hill on exact timing of the campaign.

 

Rubio is also expected to announce as soon as April, according to sources close to the senator.

 

The candidates’ moves towards official campaigns, whether they claim they’re “exploratory committees” or outright declare White House runs, gives them their best chance to set their narratives and garner big media attention, making their rollouts crucial.

 

With so many candidates likely to announce in a tight time window, how they scrap and claw for media attention will be key.

 

“All these guys want to be able to post up against Hillary,” said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson, who has ties to Rubio, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).

 

“If you’re Ted Cruz your mailing list is your main fundraising mechanism, and if you’re going to run a campaign off of that you have to go in saying ‘I’m your guy to take on Clinton.’ And it’s very difficult to do that without a big target like Hillary and without themselves being in the game,” Wilson noted.

 

Jumping in during a busy month has its risks, however.

 

“If Hillary does take the formal step of announcing in April, she’s going to chew up a couple of days or a week of news,” said Mackowiak. “The candidates want to have the days to themselves, so working around others’ schedules makes a lot of sense and that may require some adaptability on the Republicans’ side.”

 

Launching early has drawbacks, however. Candidates have to face up to the media more often once they’re in and have no excuse to duck issues or events.

 

They also can’t coordinate any longer with friendly super-PACs, a big reason why both Bush and Walker, who already have national fundraising networks and high name recognition, are likely to wait until the summer to officially announce.

 

The former Florida governor’s delay also allows him to continue to work closely with his Right to Rise super-PAC to haul in big checks before he officially joins the race.

 

As the campaigns ramp up, there’s also been a rush to snap up staff on both sides of the aisle.

 

Clinton has been especially busy in recent weeks, moving to pad out her national press team and early-primary state operations with a bevy of new hires.

 

Jesse Ferguson, who until recently was a top strategist for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is slated to have a senior communications role in the national office, with a number of other names from the DCCC and Democratic National Committee are expected to join him in the coming weeks.

 

Clinton has also hired half a dozen top Democratic operatives to run her efforts in early-voting Iowa and New Hampshire including top Matt Paul, a longtime advisor to former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D), and Mike Vlacich, who ran Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s (D-N.H.) 2014 campaign.

 

Cruz, Rubio and Paul have all also brought on new advisors in recent weeks or shifted top strategists from their official Senate offices to the campaign side.

 

All those last minute moves are to ensure that their campaign apparatus will be all systems go once they officially pull the lever.

 

“This is like a duck: placid on the surface, busy underneath,” said Wilson. “You’re going to keep seeing those staff moves.”

Hillary Clinton: running to win - but on her own terms (The Guardian)

By Ed Pilkington in Fayetteville, Arkansas

March 14, 2015

The Guardian

 

Feminist pioneer or self-interested careerist? Her closest friends, who have known her since she was lured south by boyfriend Bill, provide clues to the riddle as she prepares her bid to become America’s first female president

On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, when Hillary Clinton was in the White House, she had a long conversation with her best friend, soulmate and confidante, Diane Blair. The two women had forged a relationship in the 1970s when they were both teaching in Fayetteville in Arkansas – Bill’s home state – and would remain close until Blair’s death from cancer in 2000.

With the blunt honesty of a trusted friend, Blair raised with Clinton one of the most vexed problems that has bedevilled her years of public service: her toxic dealings with the press. Couldn’t she avoid a lot of grief, Blair suggested, by developing friendlier relations – even fake ones – with media figures? And shouldn’t she stop changing her hair so often?

Blair clearly touched a nerve, provoking a defiant riposte from the first lady. In today’s context, at the end of a week in which Hillary Clinton has yet again found herself face-to-face with a sceptical press demanding answers about her use of a private email address while working as America’s top diplomat, her robust words almost two decades ago sound uncannily prescient.

“I’m a proud woman,” Clinton began. “I’m not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I have to compromise.”

But then Clinton’s tone suddenly shifted. “But I’m just not going to,” she said. “I’m a complex person and they’re just going to have to live with that. I’m used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms.”

“Win on my own terms” – the phrase would make a great title to a chronicle of the battles Clinton has fought under the public spotlight. It runs through her White House struggles to introduce healthcare reform and her war with what she famously dubbed the “ vast right-wing conspiracy “. It was evident in her bruising clash with Barack Obama in her first bid for the presidency in 2008. And judging from this week’s events at the UN, where she treated reporters asking about her use of a private email server while secretary of state with a dismissiveness that verged on contempt, it looks like it’s becoming a storyline in the 2016 presidential campaign that she is expected to launch within weeks.

The ‘Fateville’ years Clinton’s attitude towards the press is not the only insight that can be gleaned from the friendships that she made during her early years in Arkansas. Through Diane Blair’s confidences, contained in private papers that were recently opened at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and interviews with several other close friends in Fayetteville and Little Rock, seeds of many of her later achievements and troubles, strengths and flaws, can be seen to have been planted in the rich soil of Arkansas.

Saint or sinner? Feminist pioneer or self-interested careerist? Which is Hillary Clinton? Diane Blair herself pondered deeply that question, asking herself in one of her private notes why her great friend was so polarizing, why to her Hillary Clinton was “funny, wicked and wacky” yet to others she came across as “a malevolent, power-mad, self-aggrandizing shrew”.

That unanswered question, so pertinent today, can to some extent be answered from Clinton’s Arkansas days. Some of her most controversial qualities – her fierce guarding of her privacy, the belief in doing things her own way, her fraught relationship with money – are all visible in nascent form during the period from 1974, when she moved to Fayetteville and then Little Rock, to 1993, when she entered the White House. So too are positive attributes that in the cut-and-thrust of the news cycle rarely enjoy an airing, such as her passionate embrace of women’s and children’s rights, and her undiminished and unbreakable loyalty to those she loves.

Hillary Rodham was 27 when she came to Fayetteville, a progressive college town tucked in the north-west corner of the state. “Fateville”, she called it, poking fun at the local southern drawl. It wasn’t fate that drew her here, though, so much as the relentless charm offensive Bill Clinton waged to attract her here, drawing her away from a potentially stellar legal career on the east coast.

Jim Blair, who later married Diane (Bill, as governor, officiated at their wedding), remembers the contortions Bill got into over luring Hillary to Fayetteville: “He talked about trying to persuade his girlfriend to come to Arkansas, but if she came she would be giving up a really great political career in her own right and he was in mixed emotions about talking her into it.”

Bill’s tactic was to bombard Hillary with female company drawn from his circle of friends in Fayetteville where he was teaching law. “Bill called me and said: ‘I want you to have her over, I want you to like her and I want her to feel welcome’,” said one of those women, Margaret Whillock.

Whillock did what she was told. She invited Hillary over to a lunch of gumbo on her very first day in Fayetteville, and the chemistry worked. “We had a meeting of minds, I guess you’d say,” Whillock told the Guardian. “Hillary is much warmer and thoughtful than the press or anyone else has given her credit for. You don’t see that side of her.”

First and foremost among the friendships Hillary made was Diane Blair, who was teaching politics at the university. The two women had much in common: they were both bookish, progressive, feminist outsiders; like Hillary, Blair was a newcomer to Arkansas, hailing from Washington DC as Hillary had from Chicago.

[Bill] talked about how if his girlfriend came, she would be giving up a really great political career

Jim Blair

The intimacy of their friendship sustained over many years rings out from the Blair papers. In correspondence, Clinton calls her friend “Missy Diane”, and signs Christmas cards to her from the White House “From Potus and Flotus”.

The two women regularly exchanged tips on good reads (they both loved Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, Memoirs of a Geisha) and sent each other cartoons for light relief. In 1996, Clinton sent her friend a strip that could be read two ways – as a reference to bovine spongiform encephalopathy then in the headlines, or as a self-deprecating dig at the first lady’s own beleaguered public image. The cartoon depicted a cow lying on a psychiatrist’s chair, with the caption: “I’m not a mad cow, I just have issues.”

Blair reciprocated by sending Clinton a newspaper clipping about a Walmart store in Miami that had yanked T-shirts from its shelves that were deemed too political because they bore the prediction “Someday a woman will be president.” “Outrage of the day, maybe the year!” Blair scrawled across the cutting.

There were moments of plaintive tenderness too. “I consider you a fellow canary,” Clinton wrote in one letter. “We flap our little wings harder and harder while chirping as loudly as our voices permit about what’s happening around us. Sometimes we even are heard outside our cages! I don’t feel as if I have any choice but to fly straight on.”

Ann Henry was another Fayetteville woman who forged a lasting bond with Clinton, helped along by their shared experiences as just about the only female lawyers in town. In October 1975, Henry hosted the reception party for Hillary and Bill’s wedding at her home, feting 250 guests.

“When I first met her, she was open and direct, confident and easy to visit with; we just hit it off, and it remains that way,” Henry told the Guardian.

Hillary was fired up by ideas and by causes. The three women – Ann, Diane and Hillary – would spend long hours plotting how to bring reform to Arkansas, a state that was routinely towards the bottom of national league tables for educational and other standards. “We would discuss how to improve life for students, raise education, open up opportunities for women. We were very focused,” Henry said.

While at Fayetteville, Clinton set up a clinic within the law school that offered free legal advice to those who couldn’t afford it, as well as the first rape hotline in the town, which still exists today. After moving to Little Rock in 1976 when Bill was elected the state’s attorney general, she helped found Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families that has grown to be an influential voice.

Henry said she was struck immediately by Clinton’s crystal clear sense of self. “I think she knew early on who she was and what she wanted her life to be. She was very straightforward about that.”

‘I’m not going to pretend to be somebody that I’m not’

When the difficulties began, as soon they would, Clinton could also draw upon a clear coping mechanism. She once confided in Henry her technique for comforting her infant daughter Chelsea at the end of a hard day. “We are going to wash off the dirt of today,” Hillary would say to the little girl, “and then tomorrow will be a new day and we will stand up strong.”

Hillary Rodham had her own dirt to wash off. After the wedding, she found herself at the receiving end of good ol’ southern disapproval when she decided to keep her maiden name – an act that was seen as virtually seditious in unreconstructed 1970s Arkansas.

The chorus of tut-tutting reached such a volume – from small-town gossip to high politics – that her friends felt duty bound to intervene. After Bill was elected governor of the state in 1978, Ann Henry told Hillary that people were upset to receive invitations from the governor’s mansion in the name of “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.”

“For a woman to keep her maiden name in the culture of Arkansas at that time, it was a real issue,” Henry said. “People took it to mean ‘He’s not man enough for her to take his name.’ She was getting all this flak: all the men were thinking she’s becoming a problem, and some of the women did too.”

Jim Blair gave Hillary the same advice, though he put it more colourfully: “I told her she ought to have a ceremony on the Capitol steps and let Bill put his foot on her neck.”

The name change duly followed, hastened by Bill’s 1980 defeat after two years in the governor’s job that came as a wake-up call to both of them. Hillary Rodham became Hillary Rodham Clinton. She threw away her austere glasses and styled her hair. Yet the experience of being forced to change her outward appearance clearly rankled with her for years afterwards. In the course of that Thanksgiving heart-to-heart with Diane Blair, she said: “I have compromised. I gave up my name, I got contact lenses. But I’m not going to pretend to be somebody that I’m not.”

The kerfuffle over her name was tame compared with the storms that were to come: Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, healthcare reform, Travelgate, the Lincoln Bedroom, Monica Lewinsky, Benghazi, the list goes on. This month alone we gained two new entries to the litany: the controversies over the Clinton Foundation’s acceptance of donations from foreign governments and Hillary’s private emails at the State Department.

Having met Hillary on her first day in Arkansas, Margaret Whillock has had a special perch from which to observe her friend’s repeated struggles over four decades. “She’s been pounded so much, it’s been distressing to watch. There’s always been a critic, always someone having something bad to say about her,” Whillock said.

The attacks have taken a toll, Whillock said. “She is more private now, more reserved. When she has let her guard down – that’s when the pounding has started up again.”

Clinton’s need for privacy was noted by several people, so in contrast as it is with the irrepressible effervescence of her husband. “She’s a much more private person than Bill. She has a very private nature,” said Ernest Dumas, a prominent local journalist and editor of a book of essays called The Clintons of Arkansas.

Bobby Roberts, who served as an adviser to Bill Clinton during his years as governor, agrees. “Bill is very gregarious, very outgoing – he was out in front of us all the time. She’s not like that. Secretive is not the word – I think she’s just more private, less expressive, than he is.”

For Dumas, the current firestorm over Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email address for all her official business as secretary of state between 2009 and 2013 was utterly in character. “The email controversy is the least surprising political storm I’ve ever heard,” he said.

He discerns similarities between the present furore and Clinton’s handling of the Whitewater affair – the real estate investment in the Ozark Mountains that she and Bill made in the 1970s that went bad, later prompting the agonizingly drawn-out Kenneth Starr investigation that sapped the energy of the Clinton presidency. By the time they signed the deal, the couple had moved to Little Rock where Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm.

At the height of the Whitewater imbroglio, she claimed some of the billing records of her Rose Law Firm had gone missing. When the paperwork turned up two years later it revealed nothing untoward, but the delay in disclosure fuelled speculation about her motives.

“Whitewater was much ado about nothing, as we learned,” Dumas said. “But it would never have amounted to anything if Hillary had been a bit more open about things. If she’d turned over the records it would have put an end to it pretty early.”

Clinton’s hankering for privacy should not be confused with reticence. Even in those early Arkansas days, her burning desire to be out there, to call the shots, was apparent – a precursor of the overtly political role she played in the White House and her later entry into electoral politics.

“She was always involved in policy discussions,” remembers Stephen Smith, Bill Clinton’s friend and political adviser during his term as attorney general and then in his early years as governor. “Any time we had meetings to talk about policy or campaigns, she was part of the team.”

“She was the most important person in Bill Clinton’s administration, and yet you never saw her,” said Dumas.

When Bill Clinton, in his second term as governor in 1983, came to appoint a chairman to the commission he set up to reform Arkansas’ failing education system, he consulted Hillary for advice on whom to pick. She knew just the right person. “Maybe I’ll do it,” she told him.

That anecdote was related by the Clintons to Roy Reed, a former reporter for the Arkansas Gazette and the New York Times. Reed told the Guardian that he thought Hillary’s nascent political ambitions, so evident back then, originated with idealism. “She believed in better education, that came through loud and clear, and over time people started to see it as a strength.”

Clinton talked to Diane Blair about her convictions in that heart-to-heart on Thanksgiving Day. “What I really love,” the then first lady told her great friend, “is inventing policies, seeing them put into practice, making things work. I’d be happy in a little office somewhere making things happen.”

Blurring public and private It’s a long leap from that little office somewhere to the multi-billion dollar presidential campaign she is about to unleash, but perhaps a small step in terms of basic instinct.

The other ambition Clinton displayed early was to make money. As she explains in her autobiography, Living History, she saw her role in Arkansas as partly to bring in the cash.

“Money means almost nothing to Bill Clinton,” she writes, “which is just as well, because as Governor of Arkansas he never made more than $35,000 a year. I worried that … we needed to build up a nest egg.”

The self-perception is revealing. Here was Hillary, the governor’s wife and a partner in one of the most prestigious law firms in Arkansas, seeing herself as hard-up and in need of a cushion. There are echoes here of the tone-deaf comment she made last summer about being “ dead broke “ when they emerged from the White House, and her similar remark to the Observer that she and Bill were not “truly well-off”.

As it worked out, the Clintons made nothing out of Whitewater. But she did do phenomenally well out of another Arkansas investment. So well, in fact, that it too landed her in hot water. In 1978, she put $1,000 into cattle futures, and within 10 short months had netted $99,000 in profits – an enviable rate of return that was later to draw the attention of investigators in Washington.

In the current controversies over the private emails and the foreign donations, one of the charges levelled against Clinton is that within her world, within “Hillaryland” as she has called it, the public and the private are blurred. Politics, money, friendship all fuse into one.

The seed of that inclination can also be seen to have been planted in Arkansas. The cattle futures investment was arranged for her by the Clintons’ great friend, Jim Blair, Diane’s husband, who was outside counsel for Tyson Foods and was an experienced futures trader.

“It was so absurd,” Blair told the Guardian. “It never occurred to me that people would make something out of this. This was just a deal among friends. I was just trying to give her a little advice and help her make a little money, because they didn’t have any.”

Blair believes that, like Whitewater, the furore over “Cattlegate” was politically motivated. “Hardline conservatives recognised her as a real talent to change the world, and they don’t like the world to be changed,” he said.

I have compromised. I gave up my name, I got contact lenses. But I’m not going to pretend to be somebody that I’m not.

Hillary Clinton

He added: “It was hard for me to see my friends attacked like that, to think that I had done anything that would give their enemies ammunition.”

Which brings us back to the beginning – the vexed relationship with her detractors in politics and the press. Diane Blair offers deep insights into her friend’s agitated approach to the public. She relates how resentful Clinton feels about being in the media glare, “her total exasperation with this obsession and attention, and how hard she’s finding it to conceal her contempt for it all.”

Blair also captures Clinton’s fear that the world is out to get her, a mistrust so intense it borders on paranoia. “Mostly, she can’t figure out why those people out there are so anxious to destroy them,” she writes.

That image of a woman crouched in defensive posture is as fresh today as it was when Diane Blair wrote it decades ago. We saw that woman standing in front of the cameras this week at the UN – distrust, exasperation, maybe even a hint of contempt written across her face.

As she prepares to launch her final bid to become America’s first female president, the question posed by her best friend booms out loud: why funny and wacky to those who love her, yet to others a self-aggrandizing shrew? Hillary Clinton is still seeking an answer to that riddle. She’s running out of time.

Today’s Woman (The New Yorker)

By David Remnick

March 15, 2015

The New Yorker

 

Early last week, while the political world was waiting for Hillary Clinton to address the moral, diplomatic, and technological questions posed by her e-mail habits, the United Nations issued a report asserting that more than one in three women experience sexual or physical violence in their lifetimes. One in ten females under the age of twenty is subjected to “forced sexual acts.” In more than thirty countries, it is not illegal for men to beat their wives. In the United States, eighty-three per cent of girls between twelve and sixteen confront sexual harassment in school. Even the earnest bureaucrats of the U.N., who tend to favor euphemism and skip over cruelties like honor killings and “corrective rape,” could not help but label the rate and the variety of mayhem regularly exacted upon half of humankind as “alarmingly high.”

 

The report went on to say that female political representation, while creeping higher, is still depressingly low––not least in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, the United States. The parliaments of South Africa, Ecuador, Finland, Senegal, Sweden, Cuba, Belgium, and Rwanda are all more than forty per cent female. The percentage of members in the U.S. House of Representatives who are women is eighteen. And, since it will soon be political high season on cable TV and at the town halls and diners of Iowa and New Hampshire, it bears repeating that no woman has ever been the President of the United States.

 

It was hard not to think of this status report on the condition of women in the twenty-first century while Hillary Clinton stepped into the lights before an agitated crowd of reporters at the U.N. last Tuesday. A large tapestry of “Guernica” hung behind her, and she looked no happier in that setting than the tormented figures in Picasso’s image of civil war. And yet contrition was not in her plans. Instead, she chose a familiar course, offering explanations that were by turns petulant and pretzelled. Asked about the way she chose to deal with federal guidelines on e-mail when she was the Secretary of State, she said, “I opted for convenience.” Clinton’s further explanations were so familiar, such a ride in the Wayback Machine, that you had to wonder, Why do I suddenly feel twenty years younger yet thoroughly exhausted?

 

The U.N. Secretary-General’s report is a progress report on the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which grew out of the 1995 World Conference on Women. At that conference, Clinton, as First Lady, gave an unsparing assessment of so many of the grimmer aspects of the female condition: political exclusion, discrimination, rape as a weapon of war, genital cutting, forced illiteracy, forced abortion and sterilization. She performed in a way that suggested both conviction and political talent independent of her role as the President’s wife and counsellor. The speech was as eloquent in its way as Barack Obama’s “race speech,” in the 2008 campaign, not because of its radical originality––like Obama’s, it was rooted in decades of progressive thought––but because of its potential to affect policy and mainstream opinion. ”It is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights” was a message she delivered with clarity, particulars, and force.

 

This was one reason that the press conference last week—given, presumably, as Clinton was preparing to announce a run for the Presidency, in 2016—was so dispiriting. At that moment at the U.N., she should have been returning to those feminist themes, but she used the opportunity to claim that she was only trying to protect the sanctity of her communications about her “yoga routines,” her daughter’s wedding, and her mother’s funeral. This was a notably transparent exploitation of gender. It’s one thing for a politician to be stupid; it is quite another for her to assume that we are. And what to make of a politician who protested the war in Vietnam and investigated the Watergate scandals but now writes a valentine to Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post—a book review in which Clinton calls Kissinger “surprisingly idealistic”? The peoples of Chile, Cambodia, Argentina, Bangladesh, and East Timor surely want to know more.

 

As the Clinton campaign machinery creaks into motion, voters, too, will want to know more. For one thing, who will compete with her? The likeliest Republican candidates do not exactly stride the earth as political colossi. Governor Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, is fast accumulating pots of right-wing money, but that is no guarantee that he can emerge from the ideological margins. Jeb Bush only recently secured his mother’s blessing to run and cannot hope to inspire a frenzy of support with the proposition that he is somewhat brighter than his retired older brother.

 

It is the job of the press to put pressure on power and on pretenders to power. Even in a solo primary race, reporters will scrutinize not only Hillary Clinton’s record but also her hawkish foreign-policy impulses, the dealings of the Clinton Global Initiative, and the contradiction between the need to ease the inequality gap and the candidate’s tropism toward big money. But, in the absence of a Democratic challenger, the pressure will never be what it ought to be.

 

The 2008 Democratic race was not just good sport; it also made both Obama and Clinton better. In the contest for the White House, the stakes are plain and enormous: the rights of women; the fate of the earth; the gaping disparities of income and opportunity; the stability of the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. However vexed by the politics of gender, America is ready for a woman President. Long past ready. A female President committed to the kind of vision Clinton set out twenty years ago in Beijing could exert a powerful influence on the lives of women all over the world. But if, in the end, Hillary Clinton’s only competition is herself, if all she has to contend with is the press and her less attractive instincts, she will have gained a too easy path to power at the cost of being less prepared to exercise it.

 

There are twenty months left before Election Day, 2016. Bush v. Clinton, the likeliest race (though don’t count on it), promises endless discussion of families who are as familiar to us as the Simpsons. But where are the other candidates? What is behind the national impoverishment of political talent? Isn’t there a chance that the greatest nostalgia we might feel, come primary season, is not for earlier iterations of the Clintons and the Bushes but for the President who has not yet finished his time in office?