Hillary Clinton's Protective Crouch
"I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible."
-- Email from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to aide Huma Abedin, November 2010, contained in State Department inspector general's report on Clinton's private email use.
WASHINGTON -- This is not a smoking gun -- yet it explains so much.
Actually it is the opposite of a smoking gun because Clinton in this email expresses willingness to obtain a "separate address or device" in order to fix the problem they were confronting: messages from her private account ending up in State Department spam.
If only that had happened. How many months of ugly headlines, how much political harm could Clinton have avoided if she had taken the clunky, inconvenient route of the second BlackBerry and the official email?
But the accretions, the scar tissue built up over years of politically motivated attacks and endless investigations, reinforced Clinton's instinct for the protective crouch.
"My sense of privacy -- because I do feel like I've always been a fairly private person leading a public life -- led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to of both the press and the public's interest as well as right to know things about my husband and me," Clinton said 22 years ago, at her pretty-in-pink news conference on commodities trading.
But that lesson proved impossible for Clinton to internalize, and the incursions on her privacy became more excruciating than she could have imagined that day in the State Dining Room. The ironic consequence has been even more mucking around in the personal zone that Clinton has sought so assiduously to shield.
The resulting damage, self-inflicted and staff-enabled, is incalculable. It is a political wound that refuses to heal, mostly because Clinton's enemies are all too happy to pick at it, incessantly, but also because Clinton has been so compulsively resistant to confessing error.
She dutifully acknowledges that the decision to rely on a private email account was, in retrospect, a "mistake" that she would not repeat -- duh! -- but seems constantly compelled to relitigate the conduct.
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