02 June 2016
Mrs Clinton’s Diary
Could it still go wrong?
by J.R.Thomas
Hillary Rodham has politics embedded in her very bones. She started far from the place she intends to finish, campaigning for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election. Goldwater lost overwhelmingly – he won only 38% of the vote and six states, one of the heaviest drubbings of all time. We can’t blame this on Hillary – Senator Goldwater, an acerbic Arizonian, a right winger domestically and a hawk in foreign matters, was fighting Lyndon Baines Johnson in the aftermath of John Kennedy’s assassination; as was said, “LBJ would have beaten Jesus if he had had the temerity to run”. Hillary Rodham was to become Hillary Clinton and her politics to move from Republican to Democrat, though there are quite a lot in her party that say in truth she has not moved far.
Now the glittering prize is shining and a lifetime of intense politics may be about to pay off. She is in sight of the finishing tape. Is she going to trip and fall?
Just when she least could take it, the Department of State Inspector General’s report has reignited the honesty problem which poll after poll shows to be Hillary’s weakest point. The report confirms that over 5,000 emails concerning State Department business were sent from Mrs Clinton’s personal Blackberry, via a private server under her control – one without the security profiling which the State Department routinely uses. A number of those were matters of great sensitivity which would have been designated as “Classified”, high security matters, if they had gone through the approved channels.
It is very clear that Mrs C knew that she was outside the approved security envelope – as were two close associates in her private office – and that this was a deliberate strategy by Mrs Clinton to ensure that her traffic remained outside government monitoring systems. That may be a breach of rules and very naughty, but we are among the high mountain passes of big politics here. She is not the first and certainly not the only politician to do some of her communicating over unofficial channels. For some reason, and she may have had a good one – her defenders point to the way in which President Obama managed the relationship with his Secretary of State, and his lack of enthusiasm for her campaign now – she wanted her emails unmonitored. But what is the bad stuff, what is really doing the damage, is that when the rumours of the use of an unapproved communication line started to leak out, and it was clear an investigation might well begin, Mrs Clinton ordered the destruction of the emails and the private server through which they passed. Anybody who lived through the destruction of President Richard Milhous Nixon knows that if you get caught doing wrong, ‘fess up immediately. You stand a chance of getting away with a minor crime, especially if you can make a half reasonable case for committing it. But when you destroy the evidence then you are leaving, metaphorically, the scene of an accident and you are in very dangerous territory indeed.
This investigation is going to run all summer. Mr Sanders is going to deal with it with wolfish gentility, by constantly saying that he does not wish to make anything of it. Mrs Clinton’s supporters will say that it was not her, and she was not there, and in any case, what about so and so who did just the same thing. Maybe the public will get bored with it, or maybe they didn’t trust Hillary anyway and this won’t make things any different. Could it cost her California where, according to the opinion polls, her narrow lead initially vanished when the Inspector General published his report, but has now come back? Governor Jerry Brown, a controversial governor but a popular figure, endorsed her last week (though remarking that he was “deeply impressed” by Bernie Sanders) which maybe will stabilise West Coast voter loyalty; though she still has to get the voters to actually turn out for her next Tuesday. Maybe the threat of The Donald makes life so worrying for Democrats that they will coalesce around Mrs C instead of taking a chance on Mr Sanders.
Perhaps we might be permitted a little speculation here. The wheels of American justice, although sometimes and especially in Hollywood movies prone to graft and interference, generally grind slowly but surely. This matter is too well ventilated for any hushing up and rapping of Clintonian knuckles, and the Inspector General’s report is pretty clear. The FBI is already on the case so it seems almost certain that at some point soon the file will be passed, hot potato like, to the right level and desk to determine if a felony has been committed, and if so whether charges may be brought. If found guilty, Mrs C could theoretically face a jail term, though a judge might feel that would be going too far. So what happens to a Clinton campaign at any of these key points?
The lady may well still win in California: she almost certainly will in New Jersey. That gives her a majority of elected delegates and she already has the support of the super-delegates. So the nomination is hers. Unless she is charged with a Federal offence. Then what? What if she is found guilty? If charged she might soldier on; but it is possible that the super-delegates – who are the great and good Democrats, the grandees of the party, might then say “enough” and ask her to withdraw. Or simply switch their support to Bernie; which gives him a majority. Might that be too rich for them? How about they bring in a compromise candidate to unite the party and present an honest and appealing face to the voting public? How about, for instance, Joe Biden, vice President, popular in the party and in the country. He said he would not run when asked at the beginning of this year. But if his country needed him, and if his President urged him, as he did earlier? Not surprisingly, there is a fear among some Clinton supporters that this is now the plan, and that President Obama will do nothing to save Hillary.
We are in unknown territory here (not least, your correspondent’s amazement that Hillary ever managed to transmit or receive anything on her Blackberry – maybe the service is better for Secretaries of State) and we can only watch and wait to see what happens next. The first key date is next Tuesday with the final mini Super Tuesday; if Mr Sanders wins California it is likely that Mrs Clinton may be heading for problems. Not arithmetically, she is almost bound to win a majority of convention elected delegates (she needs only 544 delegates out of 908 to clinch it, Bernie needs 811), but morally. To lose to an outsider challenger at this point in the contest would be very weakening if any challenge arose at the convention. But anybody writing off the Clinton campaign now, remember and observe Hillary’s long career, right from those far off Goldwater supporting days. She has been in many tight spots before – and she always gets out of them.
What else? Oh yes, Mr Trump passed the magic number of delegates needed to clinch him the Presidential candidature nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland in seven weeks time. But we kind of knew that. The action is all on the Democratic side now – who would ever have thought that this is how it would be in June 2016?
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