How Hillary Can Defeat Hillary
But does she care? Her persistent tendency to resist and refuse oversight and transparency until the last subpoena is issued shows tone deafness to public suspicions. Yet her penchant for hardball fits with remarkable ease in the uncivil atmosphere of polarized Washington -- an incivility that surged memorably with Republican attacks on her husband's presidency.
Today we have President Barack Obama dodging Republican obstructionism with unilateral executive actions to redefine immigrant residency status and negotiate arms control agreements without congressional approval.
In response, we have 47 senators signing a letter to Iran's leaders that undercuts President Obama's ability to sign a nuclear arms control deal with Iran without Senate approval. So much for the old American adage about politics ending at the water's edge.
Onto this political landscape comes the prospective candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who appears to have learned one of the most cynical political lessons from her days as a member of the House Judiciary Committee staff that investigated Richard Nixon's Watergate abuses: Don't leave a paper trail.
These days the paper trail is digital. Emails can be easily contained, managed and, if one so chooses, deleted if you happen to own your own server, which Clinton just happens to own.
This story's not going away. The very notion of leaving the documents on Clinton's private email account and private server up to Clinton has given new life to Rep. Trey Gowdy's House select committee on the Benghazi raid.
"One thing that's clear," said Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican, "is that we don't get to grade our own papers in life."
But Clinton thinks she does. She insists that she can be trusted to let us, the public, know what she thinks we should know. Even if she turns out to be correct on the law, her blindness to appearances of impropriety makes her sound like her own worst enemy.
Perhaps her sense of inevitability stems from expectations that her Republican rivals will self-destruct. She may be right. But self-destruction isn't limited to one party.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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