Hillary’s enduring media rift: Why her campaign needs structure and leadership ASAP - Joan Walsh

[DonViejo]

Haters will hate. Democrats may fret. But Clinton’s email troubles reflect a larger challenge that won't go away

JOAN WALSH

Hillary Clinton still doesn’t get it. Maybe she never will. And maybe that’s just fine.

The former secretary of state and current 2016 frontrunner doesn’t get why anyone but her right-wing enemies would think she did anything wrong when she mixed personal and professional email on a private account, stored on a private server, during her time at the State Department. She broke no laws, she turned over her professional email when asked to, and it will soon be displayed to the public in an “unprecedented” show of transparency, she said Tuesday.

Clinton’s ultimate reasoning – that even if she’d used two different accounts, she would still be the one who decided what were matters of state – actually makes some sense.

But she also doesn’t get that when she has to face down the media, in a real or a trumped-up scandal, she is expected to take questions patiently and without seeming rattled or aggrieved, while at least trying to pretend that she doesn’t believe everyone in the room is hopelessly biased against her.

So Clinton’s Tuesday press conference, in which she was alternately proud and defensive, probably didn’t convince anyone of anything they didn’t already believe. If you think she’s shady, then she surely looked shady to you, with her eyes too often cast down at her lectern, not at her audience. If you think she’s the persecuted victim of a vast and metastasizing right wing conspiracy, she handled an untenable situation the best anyone could.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/11/hillarys_enduring_media_rift_why_her_campaign_needs_structure_and_leadership_asap/

[leftofcool]

1. What campaign? She hasn't announced yet.

[LiberalFighter]

2. That was my thought.

[DonViejo]

3. IOW, "I didn't read the article but I thought I would respond to the headline."

Good morning!

[blm]

4. This is what some here refuse to get - we WANT her campaign to succeed.

We expect she will be the nominee, and many of us (even her critics here) will be fighting tooth and nail to win 2016.

Pointing out the flawed timing of the presser (for replacing GOP traitor headlines) and other criticisms is CONSTRUCTIVE, not destructive.

It's the campaign advisors we expect more agility from in this process. We expect capability and performance from Clinton, and demand competence and agility from her campaign.

[MBS]

5. Here's Ruth Marcus in today's WaPo

Like Joan Walsh, Marcus is also a Democrat and a commentator (so far as I can tell, and suggested also by the quotes below ) historically supportive of/sympathetic to Hillary. These paragraphs below capture my own feelings as well.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/inconvenient-questions-for-clinton-about-those-e-mails/2015/03/10/653b1aa0-c76a-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html

My reaction to this episode is a combination of exasperation, sadness and a strong sense of deja vu. It’s exasperating because it’s all so unnecessary. Accepting Clinton’s asserted reason for relying on private e-mail, why does she get to play by different rules than other senior government officials, who juggle two devices? Why, understanding what a big target she is, knowing that her records were being sought, weren’t she and her aides more careful about compliance?

It’s sad because Clinton, in my estimation, is such a strong presidential candidate — smart, disciplined, hardworking, experienced, sober-minded.

As to the deja vu, I was in the State Dining Room almost 21 years ago when Clinton, in a demure pink sweater set, held a marathon news conference to handle questions about her commodities trading, Whitewater investment and assorted other matters. “One of the things that I regret most,” Clinton said then, is that “my sense of privacy . . . led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to of both the press’s and the public’s interest, as well as right, to know things about my husband and me. . . . I’ve always believed in a zone of privacy. . .”
Back then, Clinton chalked up her difficulties to “our inexperience in Washington.” What’s the excuse now?

[blkmusclmachine]

6. Shades of John Kerry. The DEMS are going to roll over for 2016. Probably for another Bush, too.

[karynnj]

7. There is absolutely no parallel to John Kerry

John Kerry has never had the same problems Clinton has had through her career of refusing to be as transparent as she should. Nor I might add, has Kerry ever had the position HRC is being given a second time as the Party's and Democratic leaning media's golden candidate.

As to the suggestion that JK did not fight for the Presidency, his he, his family and various Democrats were out there spending 16 hour days trying to get the votes needed. As Howard Dean would be the first to explain in detail, many state Democratic organizations were in abysmal shape in 2004. GOTV was mostly outsourced to a third party that by law could not advocate for Kerry. In Ohio, the tragic result was that no one in the Democratic ranks noticed that Blackwell assigned FEWER voting machines to innercities than they had in the primaries. This led to 4 to even 10 hour waits to vote in Democratic areas - vs 5 minutes or so in the Republican areas. This meant that even if JK had energized people to come out to vote in places like Cleveland where he (and Bruce Springsteen ) had a final rally.

What is amazing is that Kerry nearly pulled it out -- against a media willing to condone a character assassination, parts of the Catholic Church illegally pushing for Bush (as at least one and likely two SC seats were up -- and they were replacing at least one conservative (Renghuist), meaning the status of Roe v Wade depended on the election. (Not to mention, we now see that it was not just those interested in abortion, but the corporate issues - had there been a President Kerry, Citizens United would not have been upheld.)

As to HRC, at this point, it looks like she is very well positioned to win both the nomination and the general election. All of this does not make me happy, but I really don't think it will change the results. I suspect that it likely is something that only people very involved in politics follow. It will make the Republicans even more certain that she is a horrible choice, but that is where they have been for decades. I suspect that Paul Begala - crude as he was - is correct that someone who is for Democratic values will vote for her if she is the nominee. I know I will - because the Republican party is so polarized to the right that all of them would be a disasters. (That leaves only a challenge in the primary - which has not yet gelled.)

[WillyT]

8. K & R !!!

[WillyT]

9. And Another...