David Michael Miller
Let me say two things about Hillary Clinton.
First, I don’t like her.
And second, I don’t care that I don’t like her.
We’re not choosing a best buddy here. We’re selecting the leader of the free world, and Clinton is eminently qualified for the job. She’s seen from the inside how a state government works, how the presidency itself works (and doesn’t), how the Congress functions and how foreign policy is conducted. And, curiously, she tends to get vilified worst when she’s not holding high public office. When she was a U.S. senator and secretary of state she got high marks, often from people you’d expect to be her enemies. I think the woman would actually make a fine president, and she’s miles more qualified than most of the yahoos running on the Republican side.
As for not liking her, well, I guess it’s the combination of having that trust fund rich kid sense of entitlement combined with the super-controlled persona. Clinton’s aides recently announced essentially that they had a carefully-thought-out plan to make her more spontaneous. Enough said.
Too much (well, almost all) of the national press coverage of Clinton is focused on her likability or her emails, and the two are often intertwined. She has made serious and detailed policy proposals, and virtually none of them have been covered or debated to any meaningful extent.
In a recent appearance on what is usually a serious news program, Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd spent pretty much the entire broadcast interview grilling Clinton on the details of how she handled her email accounts as secretary of state. No questions on foreign or domestic policy. Nope. It was all email all the time, although some real policy discussion was allowed to slip into a longer online version of the interview watched only by the nerds who write blogs for alternative weeklies.
And this is what dogs Clinton wherever she goes. Among the most serious candidates running for president she is shut out from talking about serious issues. Meanwhile, clown candidate Donald Trump gets a full airing of his crazy tax plan — just check the box that says, “I win!” Go figure.
It’s time for the press to lay off the email issue because, unless it becomes an indictable offense, there’s just not much there. And, in the meantime, voters don’t get a chance to weigh Clinton’s positions on foreign policy, the economy and so many other issues that actually matter to us.
It seems that what happened is that Clinton, knowing she was going to run for president and fearful that much of her email chatter would be an open record and subject to political manipulation, overthought the issue. She tried to find a clever way to keep stuff she thought might be problematic out of the public eye. The trouble is that, not fully understanding the “new” technology, she wandered into a political thicket much worse than what she was trying to avoid.
What’s really damaging to Clinton is her constant refrain that she didn’t know what she was doing. I accept that, but it doesn’t make it any better. To borrow a phrase from her husband, I feel her pain. Like a lot of baby boomers I struggle with this stuff, but I’m not running for president. We live in a rapidly changing world in which technology isn’t just some new fangled gadget that helps us play games, but a major part of the economy, maybe even the underpinning of it. So, to be ignorant of how technology works at just a functional level or to not grasp its meaning is a serious flaw in a candidate, and she doesn’t get a pass because she’s 67 years old.
So, Clinton has to stop with the grandmother excuses and learn more than she apparently knows now about how email and other technologies work and their implications for our society, our economy and the broader world.
But what many of us really want is for the press to drill down on substantive questions about her policy choices and how and where she would lead our nation. Unless there is a criminal indictment coming — and I can’t believe there is — let’s just move on.
I don’t like Hillary Clinton. She screwed up on her emails. I don’t care much about either one of those things. What else has she got?
