Reince Priebus; Even Nixon didn't destroy the tapes

[Fuzzy Bear]

Hillary is a flawed candidate period and the Republicans will drag this out all long as they can. How will it look when Hillary has to testify in the middle of the 2016 campaign?

Last time she had to testify about Benghazi she actually did fairly well and it improved her image. Also, I think it is getting a little ridiculous that a House Select Committee on Benghazi is turning into the political arm of the GOP. It's almost like Issa is still in charge of all these fake investigations that turn up no wrongdoing but still cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.

Agreed as far as you go.  Benghazi is really about the GOP being robbed of a talking point during a close campaign.  There's no real discussion about the nuts and bolts issue of security at our embassies, the bulk of which is provided by the host countries.  (If the host country can't provide the bulk of security for our embassy there, we pull the embassy; this is what we have always done, but few Americans realize this.)  

This e-mail scandal, however, is about the Clinton way of doing things.  It's about secrecy to save face.  People DON'T like this, and Hillary, unlike Bill, is NOT likable.  

The GOP campaign against HRC (by anyone but Jeb) will be a war of attrition, chipping, chipping, chipping away at her image to the point where folks in the middle will ask just exactly why this particular woman, out of all of the people eligible to run for President and qualified to be President, should be "The First".  If the GOP nominates Ted Cruz, they'll fall short, but if they nominate a qualified and experienced candidate with political savvy like, say, John Kasich, the path back to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. becomes an easier path for the GOP.  The American electorate has changed a great deal since 1988, but there is still a key bloc of voters in the middle who are truly undecided whom are not going to just blow off Hillary's blowing off rules and will not warm to her secrecy.  

[Fuzzy Bear]

Hillary is extremely intelligent and accomplished.

This talking point is getting extremely annoying. Hillary's actual resume is actually quite unremarkable.

On the contrary, these throwaway superlatives do not do her justice.

She was the elected president of the Wellesley College Graduate Association, where she "organized a two-day student strike and worked with Wellesley's black students to recruit more black students and faculty" and was "instrumental in keeping Wellesley from being embroiled in the student disruptions common to other colleges," and a "number of her fellow students thought she might some day become the first female President of the United States". She was the first student commencement speaker in Wellesley's history, and gave a speech which received a 7-minute standing ovation and was featured in Life Magazine.

She entered Yale Law School only the second year after it began to admit women, the first class having only 7 women. There, she researched childhood development to contribute to a then cutting-edge work, wrote a frequently-cited article in the Harvard Education Review on the children's' rights movement, and worked as a congressional aide for Walter Mondale. After law school, she served on the Watergate impeachment committee researching the historical grounds for impeachment, sitting to the left of inquiry leader John Doar.

By then, her star was considered so bright that Democratic consultant Betsey Wright moved to Washington from Texas in part to help her political career, and "thought Rodham had the potential to become a future senator or president". When Bill Clinton decided to run for congress in Arkansas, she was "on the phone with him, sometimes four times a day, giving him advice, mentoring him". When a friend discovered a letter from her to Bill around this period, it "talked of thier future plans... politicial plans that is the best way tot put it... the letter had everything to do with their careers, so unusual in that there was no talk of home, family and marriage."

Would Bill have been elected president without her?

She joined the Rose Law firm, the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi, as its first woman partner, and continued to publish scholarly articles. An American Bar Association chair later said, "Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate."Historian Garry Wills would later describe her as "one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades." She was campaign director of field operations in Indiana for Jimmy Carter, on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation, and was chair of the board for two years during which funding increased threefold.

This is just until 1980!

If I go on any longer, no one will read it (if you made it this far).

All of the above is reduced to "a mere political spouse"?

The woman had accomplishments in spades. I mean look, I don't think you're a sexist or anything, but it stinks how when a woman is married to a man whose career is more high flying than hers, her own accomplishments, no matter how great, get somehow erased and dissolved and folded into his identity.

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But she does have a career of her own. That's the thing. No one says that Obama doesn't have a career of his own because he wouldn't be where he is without Michelle (who helped him sell himself as authentic to black community) or David Axelrod (who helped him sell himself to whites) or wealthy Chicago donors like Penny Pritzker (who bankrolled his early career). He wouldn't be where he is without any of those people. None of us would be where we are without our parents, at the very least.

Why is Hillary held to a higher standard then? No one says Ted Kennedy never had a career of his own because he wouldn't have been Senator had he not been a Kennedy.

When she put on that wedding ring she didn't stop becoming a person. She didn't give up her right to a career. Nor did she when her husband was elected. She ran for Senate, putting together a campaign, visiting every county in New York, staking out positions, participating in debates, making ads, just the same as everyone else who runs a Senate campaign. Her race was competitive.

She got as much legislation passed as one could expect of a junior Senator in the minority who was given no special favors. Does she have a seminal law in her name from her time in the Senate? No. Neither does Obama or any other Senator running for president this year. Neither did Jack Kennedy. Everything she has, she's accomplished out of her own efforts.

She did great in her 2008 campaign. She was only favored by a relatively small margin throughout most of the campaign. She was running against a phenomenon-- a guy who could get 20,000 people to show up at my alma mater to see him (Howard Dean only 3,700; Gore only got 800). A guy who could get 20,000 people in blood red states like Idaho and North Dakota and Kansas to show up and see him. A guy who received incredibly positive news coverage -- Chris Matthews even got a tingle up his leg! -- and endorsements from most major newspapers, as well as the party's previous presidential nominee, and its most famous senior Senator. A guy who could rack up 95% of the vote in a demographic that made up 20% of the primary electorate, leaving her with the option of winning the rest by a landslide if she wanted to win by the narrowest of margins.

And yet she still pulled even -- winning roughly the same amount of votes, and winning the last primary in South Dakota even as the media was calling the nomination for Obama.

And yet she endorsed Obama immediately, campaigned for him, and served as his Secretary of State without drama, and led her State Department for 4 years, during which time she initiated talks with Iran on its nuclear deal that now look likely to bear fruit.

And that's still not enough?

Bill Clinton lost his bid for re-election as Governor of Arkansas in 1980.  One reason was, certainly, the problems Democrats in Arkansas ran into when the Carter Administration settled thousands of Cuban refugees in Ft. Smith and problems occurred.  But another reason was that the rural folks of Arkansas did not like Hillary Clinton.

While campaigning for Bill in 1980, HRC would introduce herself as "Hillary Rodham".   There was a story, recounted in THE ALMANAC OF AMERICAN POLITICS 1984 which documents Hillary campaigning as "Hillary Rodham" and a male Arkansan stating "Down here, when a woman gets married, she takes her husband's name."  This cultural disconnect almost ruined Bill Clinton's career before it really got started; he was almost consigned to be Chairman of the DNC before he nixed that idea and decided to come back in 1982.

That's why I can't buy the idea that Bill wouldn't have been elected without Hillary.  Nonsense.  Hillary's self-centeredness and her tin ear cost Bill Clinton the 1980 election in Arkansas.  If she, as a wife, didn't want to change her name, that's one thing, but she has always claimed to be MORE than a political wife.  She's always positioned herself as part of the brain trust, and not in a Nancy Reagan way, but in an unprecedented way.  When you're part of the brain trust, either in campaigning or in governing, you don't assert your own issue; you submit your personal agenda to the agenda of the campaign.  It's one thing to shift your stance on the Equal Rights Amendment to satisfy a conservative electorate, it's another thing to defy the custom of a woman taking a husband's name when you are the Governor's wife in a place like Arkansas, and it's still another thing to do so when you are part of your husband's political team, and "not just a wife".

That's the reason why people like Bill more than Hillary.  Bill's a philanderer and a closet misogynist, but he's likable, and relatively unpretentious in many ways.  Hillary, on the other hand, is humorless and full of herself, and projects as jealous of her husband because he's had the political career she covets.  And she'd come off that way even if Bill wasn't a philanderer.  People don't like that; they don't like wives who are jealous of their husbands and who seek to prove to the world that they are superior to their husbands.  HRC may well be superior to Bill, but the striving is obvious, and it makes uncomfortable a number of key voters in the middle of the spectrum who are uber-crucial in today's elections.