The great email saga is over!
Mrs. Clinton is sorry for not keeping two email accounts -- a personal one and a business one. Fine, thank goodness that "serious" matter is out of the way so we can turn to the lesser issues of persistent racial hatred in too many law enforcement venues (more below), unexplained inequality, underemployment, income maldistribution aided and abetted by corporately purchased politics, and a whole lot more both at home and abroad.
Let me say one last time that as an ambassador who had occasion to study the regulations that govern the Department of State, it was gracious of Mrs. Clinton to apologize. In truth, the regulations never really anticipated Hillary's situation. Most people tend to overuse their employer's email server. How many of us have ever checked up on a ball score or shopped on eBay at the office? Be honest. Sure every employer discourages if not forbids this, but the employer that isn't realistic about that limitation will soon find an office of disgruntled people who don't divide life that neatly. That is why the State Department regs go on at length about not "excessively using business computers" for personal matters. There is not one word about an employee like Mrs. Clinton paying for equipment that her government could then use free of charge. How many of us buy the boss a new PC for his use? For day-to-day unclassified bureaucratic work that is exactly what Hillary was doing, and it's no wonder the FBI concluded that what Mrs. Clinton was doing violated, well, nothing. It probably would have helped matters if it was clear that the State Department, unlike some other domestic agencies, maintained two systems of its own -- one exclusively for classified documents, an arrangement that included email destined for Mrs. Clinton, and that there was no reason the security of that closed system was hindered by the Secretary's desire for greater personal privacy and her willingness to bear the extra cost to maintain it.
So why did it take so long to get to this obvious answer?
My own sense is that the email blather only stuck around because the media was miffed by an implied suggestion among her most fervent admirers that Mrs. Clinton -- by virtue of her experience in executive governance that far exceeds virtually all of her opponents together -- had an "entitlement" to the Democratic nomination, if not the presidency itself. A vast majority may well in its time affirm that Mrs. Clinton's experience outshines all of her opposition, but democracies require the votes to be counted anyway. What's more, unless the new television season yields more than it has already, Americans enjoy -- to a point -- political debate and revolt at the notion that it will be over before they can get a beer and a snack out of the kitchen. Anyone watching early season college football knows the difficulty for the sports media to maintain fan interest and viewership in Ohio State's rout of Hawaii or USC's pounding of Idaho. Nevertheless, since those Chevys still have to be sold, we tolerate the commentary bending reality to hold our interest.
Such suspension of reality is reasonably harmless on the grid iron, though it can have one untoward effect -- convincing the highly favored that they need not show up for the game. As a long-time Notre Dame fan, I have witnessed the occasional ill effect of over-confidence. Of course as a Cubs fan, I have witnessed the ill effect of foreordained doom as well -- but I digress, and the less said about Billy Goat curses as the denizens of Wrigleyville face the Cards the better.
Let's face it, even as she fights for women and against the systematic denial of full opportunity for all; even as her sensitivity on matters of civil liberty is great, and even as she is hardly reticent to speak her mind and stand her ground when need be, she -- by stint of her own 2008 efforts, it should be noted -- was and is the frontrunner for 2016. Frankly, at times she has as a consequence been too much self-assured Fighting Irish and not enough Cubs or at least the long-time beloved "America's team" that still has to get it done on the field.
The sports metaphor only goes so far, of course. I suspect there are some who see Mr. Trump as the come-from-behind champion. Start a conversation about "The Donald" and one hears the frustration that for a time inflates a populist underdog. But reality sets in soon enough when one soberly asks: and how will Mr. Trump fare on a dangerous world stage? How could it possibly go well, when Trump's narrowness of mind and background suggests to him in a friendly interview with a fellow conservative that he need not even know the names, let alone the historical commitments of foreign figures that today are roiling Iraq, Syria, Libya and throughout the central African continent and the Middle East? What mother or father will entrust the future of their son or daughter to a putative commander in chief who apparently thinks he is so smart that he can cram, like the below average high schooler, the identities of those he must successfully engage in diplomacy to avert more wasted loss of life and treasure.
For a little while America can view these early campaign months as what one of my dear friends puts it: "an incredible piece of [political] theatre!" But given the escalating threats against world order, the allowance for humor or tolerance of those who extol ignorance as virtue must be short.
Mr. Trump is the main exponent of such smug foolishness, but Walker, Cruz are not far behind. Mrs. Clinton is now warming to the fight, and one sees less and less of any sense of entitlement on her part or among her campaign staff. By depth, by time in service, she may well be entitled, but that is not the way of democracy. In our system, the champion of yesteryear needs to be, as Teddy Roosevelt put it, "in the arena" today.
The playing field should be even however. Trump's climbing poll numbers should merit both greater media scrutiny of his often contradictory statements and his penchant for blame-mongering. Trump is expected to elaborate a tax reform plan in the next few weeks. Trump has had appeal for beleaguered middle-income workers because his populist rhetoric often seems to mirror the general angst that virtually everything is out of our control, and like the stock market or the Greek economy, getting worse.
Mr. Trump's plans are little more than rhetoric. Moreover, he rather indiscriminately blames the outsider without accounting for the fact that globalization renders the characterization of who's inside and who's out rather dubious if not senseless. Contrary to conservatives of the past, Trump aims at raising tariffs on the products of American firms that have relocated in less expensive developing nations. Putting aside any claim of social justice -- a matter Pope Francis will likely challenge us to think about -- why this wouldn't just exacerbate the pressure for migrant populations to head in larger number to the U.S. is a puzzle Trump will need to explain.
Trump's statements not infrequently are at war with each other. Trump's tax plan, for example, has yet to explain how his desire "to lower taxes for people that are making a lot of money that need incentives," addresses the wage- and employment-troubled middle class. Usually, Trump on the stump ends up being Donny-One-Note, finding some way to blame outsiders. Trump has even asserted that the troubling police racism in Ferguson and elsewhere across the country is the result of "roving bands of illegal immigrants," a non-fact that has left the people and mayors of these troubled places, to collectively respond: "say what?"
The good thing about Mrs. Clinton's return to the fight is its, well, trump of Trump's nonsense. Hillary Clinton is not someone who stays down on the mat, and as those of us who have worked in government alongside her know, she is often at her best when her opposition overreaches and distorts, and Mr. Trump when coherent is the master over-reacher, and worse his aim seems almost always to be mean-spirited.
And here is how this matters. While Mr. Trump has been seeing non-existent, "roving illegal immigrants" as the source of police violence against unarmed black youth, Mrs. Clinton has been getting right to the unpleasant reality saying: "we cannot ignore the inequities that persist in our justice system." None of the Republicans and few Democrats have been candid enough to acknowledge what every black teenager in America knows and scholars of our criminal justice system repeatedly confirm: blacks get treated differently than whites when it comes to everything from traffic stops to sentencing. Echoing Martin Luther King and John Kennedy, Hillary's commitment to equality is personally and eloquently put. As Kennedy said: "If a Negro can't enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?" So too, Mrs. Clinton has been asking whites to put themselves in the shoes of black Americans. Said the Secretary at a recent event in San Francisco:
Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers instead of the other way around. If white offenders received prison sentences ten percent longer than black offenders for the same crimes. If a third of all white men -- just look at this room and take one-third -- went to prison during their lifetime. Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans in so many of the communities in which they live.
The black-white comparison is arguably harder to articulate today than 1963 because it forces us to admit that this moment in our history is one of unrealized promise. The Obama-esque hope of transcending race now seems uncomfortably diminished by Ferguson and the repulsive and tragic and apparently persistent racism that manifests itself in far too many parts of the nation in police violence.
Discomfiting or not, deadly police misbehavior has to be a concern that is front and center in the 2016 campaign. However aberrant racially-motivated police may be within the law enforcement community, it is nevertheless intolerable. We ought not to be building walls, but understanding. I am no longer certain of the corrective steps necessary in the face of unspeakable violence emanating from those who we have entrusted to protect us from it, but I know this, we won't find out if we are searching for migratory scapegoats.
The brim of Mr. Trump's cap proclaims a desire to "Make America Great Again," but his politics of blame and division can only take us farther from what "we the people" hoped for in our constitutional draft calling for greater unity -- that is, a "more perfect union."