Monday, March 9, 2015

Hillary Hurting Hillary

On Friday we learned that the economy had produced 295,000 new private sector jobs in February. The event marked the 12th straight month of 200,000+ job growth; five straight years of positive numbers. We should be celebrating this remarkable economic recovery and figuring out ways to build on this momentum.

Instead we are talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

The stock market has been consistently producing record numbers. Corporations are making record profits. We should be debating how we can help the middle class share in this bounty.

Instead we are debating Hillary Clinton’s emails.

This past weekend thousands of Americans went to Selma, Alabama to remember, mourn and celebrate Bloody Sunday. We should all be taking this time to remember one of the most historic moments in our nation’s history and discussing how we can bridge the racial divide that still exists.

Instead we are discussing Hillary Clinton’s emails.

We should be finding ways to create jobs, debating the plight of the middle class, resolving immigration reform, fixing the ACA, reducing our debt, improving our education system, repairing our bridges and roadways, securing Medicare and Medicaid, and passing a budget to fund the government.
But instead we are transfixed by the hype over Hillary Clinton’s emails. Watch any interview with any government official and one of the first questions you will hear concerns Hillary Clinton’s emails.

If you don’t think this is a big deal check out the White House response to the Hillary frenzy. The White House knows that everything they have worked for over the past six years will be torn apart if a Republican takes over the White House. Hillary Clinton is their best chance to keep that from happening. But when fielding the obligatory questions about the secretary’s actions you find nothing remotely resembling a word of support.

Check out the president’s manner and response when hit with the same subject. He is clearly pissed. The last thing the president wants to be the centerpiece of his last two years in office is a scandal over Hillary’s emails. He has a legacy that the wants to secure. Hillary is not part of it.

My concern is not about Hillary’s emails. My concern is what happens if Hillary becomes president. I mean, is this what a Hillary Clinton presidency looks like? Progress held hostage by scandal? Transparency clouded by secrecy? Obfuscation in congress replaced by conspiracy theories emanating from the White House? Does the country stall in a ditch while Mrs. Clinton battles to fight her demons and repair her self-inflicted wounds?

Consider this… Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State. She sets up a private server in her own home for her to use/store her personal and government related emails. She later advises all state department employees that they are to conform to a White House directive requiring ALL administration employees them to establish and use a secured government email account for all government email correspondence. At one point she even fires one of her ambassadors in part for failing to comply with this directive. Once again proving that in Clintonville the rules are but suggestions and secrecy is key.

Key members of the Democratic Party have urged Secretary Clinton to come forward and address the issue. The word from the Clinton camp is that she will finally do so this week. But will anybody believe her? After decades of playing fast and loose with the truth her reputation would seem to be baked in the cake.

It seems to me that the only way that she can change the narrative and put this behind her is to turn her private server over to the government. Let the public see it all…the good and the bad. The photos of the doting grandmother…and the United States Secretary of State using her position to leverage donations from foreign governments for the Clinton Foundation. She will either be vindicated and her reputation going forward enhanced; or she will crash and burn like so many politicians before her that thought they were somehow above the law.

Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. There is no one to challenge her. Recent polls show that if the general election were held today she would trounce any of the possible Republican challengers by a wide margin. The only person that can keep Hillary Clinton form becoming our nation’s first female president…is Hillary Clinton. Over the past several days she has been doing just that.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

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