Hating Hillary

"We are not going to have any comment on Biden stories except I love the guy."--Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, giving the perfect answer.

Hillary Clinton's seemingly inevitable march to the Democratic presidential nomination finds itself in a perhaps equally inevitable stage of distress.

It's not clear what she has done wrong except get herself disliked and distrusted, a chronic but worsened condition.

Republicans have exploited her bunker mentality in keeping her emails as secretary of state off a government server, and then, when turning them over for public release, saying she had taken out the personal ones and that we'd have to trust her on that.

Apparently we don't.


It's not clear to me what the email issue is supposed to say about her worthiness for the presidency.

We already knew she distrusted Republicans and the media and treasured what she calls a zone of privacy. You can be a competent president and distrust Republicans and the media and treasure a zone of privacy.

We already knew that she could dissemble. But we've had lots of presidents who didn't tell us the straight skinny.

One of those presidents said "read my lips, no new taxes," and then raised taxes.

One did, in fact, have sexual relations with that woman.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And not all of us could keep our health insurance if we liked it.

It turns out that, although Clinton told us she sent no classified information by email over her personal server, some of her emails now being released contained blacked-out information now deemed classified.

So far those have been emails that she received, not initiated. They apparently were not marked classified at the time she received them and replied.

Her problem seems to be no particular email or any particular wrong. Her problem seems to be that the matter simply exists.

A judge has ordered expeditious release of these emails, which cover thousands upon thousands of pages. The State Department is laboriously poring over all of them before releasing them in tortuous increments.

Thus, the pundits explain, the problem for Clinton is that this issue is "not going to go away," because, every few weeks or so, we'll have another dump of emails and renewed attention by the media.

For now the percentage of poll respondents finding Clinton neither honest nor trustworthy has reached a remarkable level--57 percent.

Naturally, then, the New York Times writes that leading Democrats are wringing their hands. It reports that Vice President Joe Biden is having people in to talk about his running.

Biden is one of the richer characters in contemporary American politics. His biography of surviving family tragedy is moving. His working-class Catholic roots and manner connect him with key swing voters. He has a history of clear competence--in foreign relations, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as a generally liked Senate insider and as vice president.

But his style is incurably wince-inducing. He can be a blowhard. He talks of himself in the third person. He says indelicate and inappropriate things. He can come off as clownish.

He can let himself get overheard telling the president of the United States that passage of the Affordable Care Act is a big bleeping deal.

In his vice presidential debate in 2012 with Paul Ryan, Biden simply wouldn't shut up, or quit interrupting, even after he had the young man bested. Ryan stayed in the fray only by Biden's inability to be discreet.

Biden has run for president twice and not amounted to anything either time. He abandoned his first race, in 1988, when it turned out that the poetic life story he was telling on himself contained extended phrases matching those of a leading British Labor Party politician.

For reasons having to do with his personal story and his substance and his volatile style, Biden is both beloved and dreaded in the national Democratic establishment.

So the statement above from Hillary's communications aide, emailed to Bloomberg Politics in response to a request for a comment, qualifies as one thing the Clinton campaign did not get wrong. It was pitch-perfect.

No comment. Except that we love Joe.

I suspect the Biden boomlet will pass. I suspect that Hillary's inevitability--for the nomination, not the election--will persist, even if Bernie Sanders nearly beats her, or actually does, in Iowa and/or New Hampshire.

And I suspect she'll be dependent for victory in November 2016 on votes from people who don't much like or trust her. But that's do-able, considering demographics and the Republicans.

John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 08/04/2015

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