The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty has interesting insights into Hillary Clinton's propensity to muddle friendship with politics -- loyalty with discretion. Her work as Secretary of State was "an archetype of crisp managerial efficiency." As distinct, the Post notes, from how her presidential campaign was managed. It was a mess.
But her time at State does show ongoing problems, lapses in judgment ... even defiance. Her side-stepping of the policy when it came to her private email account is only one example, it seems.
...A trove of newly released e-mails suggests that one of Clinton’s tendencies persisted during her time as secretary of state — an inability to separate her longtime loyalties from the business at hand.
The e-mails from her private account reveal that she passed along no fewer than 25 memos about Libya from friend and political ally Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal had business interests in Libya but no diplomatic expertise there.
Moreover, she did so after the White House had blocked her from hiring Blumenthal at the State Department. The president’s team considered him untrustworthy and prone to starting rumors. ...WaPo
Clinton defends her rule-breaking as a way of staying in touch with reality, of not being trapped in an agency bubble. But pulling old friends into her decision-making process proved to be destructive during her 2008 campaign.
Her 2016 organization has been built with those mistakes in mind. Relatively few of those who were involved in 2008 remain; in their place is a new generation of data-driven operatives, few of whom have long or deep ties to the candidate herself.
Her new campaign chairman, John Podesta, was picked in part for his willingness to act as an enforcer.
“With Podesta in charge,” said a longtime Clinton friend, “it’s a new game in the sense that Podesta’s big skill is the ability to tell people to go to hell.”
In other words, they are building a different kind of Clinton campaign. The question is whether the candidate can be a different kind of Clinton. ...WaPo
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Who is Hillary and what are her strengths?
Peter Beinart reports that the Clinton campaign -- this year's edition -- is showing a good deal more savvy in handling their candidate.
Soaring rhetoric and grand themes have never been Hillary’s strengths. That’s one reason so many liberals found her so much less inspirational than Barack Obama in 2008. And it’s a problem with deep roots. In his biography, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein describes Hillary, then in law school, struggling to articulate her generation’s perspective in an address to the League of Women Voters. “If she was speaking about a clearly defined subject,” Bernstein writes, “her thoughts would be well organized, finely articulated, and delivered in almost perfect outline form. But before the League audience, she again and again lapsed into sweeping abstractions.”
Team Clinton appears to understand this. And so it has done something shrewd. Instead of talking vision, Hillary is talking policy, which she does really well. ...Beinart,Atlantic
But this vision thing will be demanded of any serious candidate for the presidency. Hillary will have to face the hightone rhetoric of one or another Republican candidate.
Sooner or later, Hillary will have to move from policy to philosophy. It may be a rocky transition. And if the Republicans nominate Marco Rubio (which at this point looks like a decent bet), she will face a candidate who interweaves personal biography and national aspiration better than she does. But if Hillary stumbles, these opening weeks of her campaign may offer a template for how she regains her footing. She’s at her best talking about America not abstractly, but concretely. She’s most inspiring when talking not about what she believes, but about what she wants to do. And she most effectively humanizes herself by being true to who she is: knowledgeable, passionate, and vaguely obsessive about making government work. Against Rubio, or any other likely Republican challenger, that identity should provide an excellent contrast. ...Beinart,Atlantic
The GOP is producing candidates who, for the most part, have eagerly climbed to the top of the mast but who wouldn't know what to do if you handed them the tiller.
