Hillary's problem isn't <i>your</i> obsession with her emails

Have I mentioned recently that the 2016 presidential race is kind of insane. And no, this post isn't about Do....that guy. We've talked about him enough for now. But what about the insane number of candidates? Every day I'm jolted by the thought of someone I completely forgot was even running....George Pataki? Lindsey Graham? Jim Webb? Jeb Bush? And what about those crazy voters? While most folks are still locked into their ideological boxes, a lot of voters have reached the conclusion that if America's problems are to be solved, it won't happen with your garden-variety blow-dried American politician. Better to elect a doctor who thinks Obamacare is worse than 9/11!

Anyway, all of this makes 2015-16 a terrible, terrible time to be Hillary Clinton.

As it probably should be, in a way. It's not that she's too old or, heaven forbid, that she's a woman. On the age front, a dude whose five or six years older -- Bernie Sanders -- is tearing it up on the campaign trail, and on the gender front, it's embarrassing in 2015 that America has never had a female president. But this particular 68-year-old woman is just too closely associated with all of the bad things that our perhaps crazy-like-a-fox electorate is worked up about. Income inequality? Her husband fostered that with a pro-Wall Street agenda that included repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, setting the stage for the 2008 economic crisis. Ditto for mass incarceration. As a senator, Hillary Clinton voted to authorize the horribly ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. Her conversion on the 2016 campaign trail toward a more progressive agenda is a good thing, but a lot of Democratic voters are asking themselves, why vote for a convert when we can have the real thing? Even with her tack to the left, executives at Wall Street's Goldman Sachs said they'd be equally happy with Clinton or Bush. Makes you think, doesn't it?

And that's not her only problem. In most long-lasting marriages, opposites attract, so is it really  a shock that the wife of the greatest natural-born politician of the 20th Century is stiff and wooden out on the trail? And there's the troubling matter of ethics. The obscene amount of money that both Clintons have been paid by corporations and by international interest groups to give short uneventful speeches may be legal, but that doesn't dispel the notion that to get rich in America in 2015, who you know matters more than what you do. The whole Clinton Foundation thing, although it's surely done some good works, still comes off as a little dodgy -- politically connected folks making too much money, huge donors with a little too much interest in who becomes our 45th president.

What I'm trying to say is that if you're looking for reasons not to vote for Hillary Clinton...they exist. And every day, in the comments on this blog and in occasional emails, I hear from people who indeed have no intention of pulling the lever for Hillary '16 -- and yet they only occasionally mention the many issues above. They just want to talk about one thing.

The emails.

I don't get it. Unless you've been hiding in Abbotabad for the last decade, you know that Clinton set up a private email server (in her bathroom!...in case you weren't convinced that the whole matter stinks) and used a private account to send emails, including some important State Department business (not to mention gelfilte fish). Some of the material in the emails and on the server almost certainly fell into that murky national-security-state black hole of "classified information." Some of the emails that Clinton took it upon herself to deem as private or personal have already been permanently erased.

This was certainly stupid...politically. Quod erat demonstrandum -- just turn on your TV any time of day and listen to what the talking heads (no, not these ones, unfortunately) have deemed to be The Most Interesting Thing in the World. And there is some justified sense that the actual problems of the Clinton family -- a penchant for secrecy and for being too clever by half, situational ethics -- are reflected in her handling of this email thingee. But to me, on a list of 50 things to talk about Hillary Clinton, this would be maybe No. 47. Maybe that's why I never because a "Morning Joe" inside-the-Beltway journalism superstar.

There's simply no clear indication that the system Clinton created was improper, let alone illegal at the time it happened; at least one of her Republican predecessors as Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had also used private email on the job. As for the probe into whether classified material was in the emails, maybe my reaction is partly personal: I think that 95 percent of the stuff that our government declares as "classified" is total BS -- meant to hide information from the American people, not from our foreign rivals. If you're the kind of pants-wetting Fox News type who worships at the altar of towering "Pope Fences" and 17-color-coded security alerts, your view of Clinton's email habits may be more serious. But on a par with Watergate -- as increasingly delusional former Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, and many on the right, have suggested? Give me a break!

Where was this worse-than-Watergate crowd when the likes of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney or the George W. Bush administration used email practices or mass deletions of information that seem on the face to be far worse? More to the point, Watergate was, well, Watergate because we learned over time what Richard Nixon was covering up -- break-ins, wiretapping, dirty tricks, and a massive campaign of unlawful activities against political opponents and dissidents. What is Hillary Clinton hiding? No one seems to have any idea -- but lots of people just know it was something really bad. Because...Hillary!

What's really going on here? The same instinct fueling the tulip mania over the Hillary emails was behind the Obama-is-a-Muslim-Kenyan-socialist movement. In the case of Obama, for the then-growing Tea Party, it simply wasn't enough to dislike the president's more expansive view of a role for government. No, Obama was the Other who had to be completely delegitimized as a non-citizen who didn't love or even understand America because it wasn't his country. In our overly caffeinated world of entertainment politics, disagreement is for wimps, and all-out destruction is king. For Clinton, her awkward style and the hypocrisy of getting $250,000 for a 30-minute speech on raising up the middle class isn't enough. She must be impeached -- if not legally, then in the court of political opinion. If it's over something as trival as her email habits, so be it.

It would be bad enough if this irrational witch hunt were merely playing out among the folks that Clinton used to call "everyday people." Instead, the yes-sometimes-we-are-lame-stream-media has picked up the baton in order to beat the candidate around the upper torso with it. On one hand, I would like to see Clinton give a lot more news conferences and interviews; on the other hand, it's completely frustrating that 75 percent of the interviews she does give are consumed with this affair -- this thing that matters not in the least to the average voter who's just busy trying to figure out how to pay his water bill. It's gotten to the point where journalists are less asking her questions and more demanding, "Repent!" Or, "Why don't you apologize? Wait, you are apologizing? Well, why did it take so long to apologize?!"

Meanwhile, we had a former vice president, Dick Cheney, in Washington to give his opinion in Iran, even though his last major venture into foreign policy was a war started on trumped-up or completely fictitious pretenses, resulting in the death of more then 4,000 fellow Americans and a few hundred thousand Iraqis, not to mention all the maimed, innocent women and children whose arms or legs were blown to shreds in a conflict that lasted years and accomplished nothing. But not once, in the many times that Cheney has been on TV since these, um, unfortunate events, have I seen a reporter ask him to apologize. Too bad he didn't plan his war crimes with an email server in his bathroom, I guess.

So, yeah, Hillary Clinton has some problems. But an email problem? That's YOUR problem. Not mine, And, frankly, not America's.