http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/clinton-emails-115847.html?cmpid=sf#ixzz3TfN8ZRzQTeam Clinton Will Beat the Press—Again
They know they can outlast the media’s attention, even with the email scandal.
By JACK SHAFER March 06, 2015
The second-guessing of Hillary Clinton’s email hygiene while secretary of state has produced hundreds of news stories and a slew of compelling questions.
Why, for instance, did Clinton insist on using a private email account for official business when State Department policy and the law dictate an official email account? Why did she persist in using private email, which she should have known was not secure? Why, when the State Department discovered last summer that she had been using a private address, did she not go public with her transgression?
Why did she decide that her staff—and not the State Department—be put in charge of determining which “private” mails would be surrendered to the State Department? Why, instead of coming completely clean on the topic, did she tweet that she wants State to release her emails—a disingenuous move on her part because State doesn’t have access to the whole trove?
Indeed, why her whole lackadaisical attitude so far about her emails?
The answer is that while reporters operate in insect time, buzzing over facts and queries that may have a life of hours, days, or weeks before expiring in a natural death, the Clintons operate in geological time. She and her campaign staff have a 20-month-long runway in front of them, and like a glacier they will patiently grind their opponents into gravel by applying time and pressure. In the Clinton team’s Machiavellian view, directly responding to the press corps' questions on the press corps’ timetable will only give greater longevity to the story.
The longer Hillary Clinton sits tight and allows the email collection and vetting “process” to work in the background, issuing assurances that she’s now in complete compliance, the better off she will be. The press insects will lose interest and move on to other, more juicy sources of meat. A reporter can’t write something about nothing very many times before editors and readers rebel.
Clinton’s political foes and the press tend to view her glacial strategy as stonewalling—without acknowledging that good stonewalls make good politics and sometimes even better press coverage. Everybody knows the press has a short attention-span. Even when binging on Adderall, reporters will allow today’s news stories to rot to dust if they think they can squeeze more nutrition out of tomorrow’s news.
As an inordinately lucky politician, Clinton knows from her husband’s experience that some foreign disaster or domestic crisis can be relied upon to ride to her rescue and dislodge the email story from the dailies’ front pages. The only time you need to “get ahead of bad news” is when you can’t avoid doing so.
The stonewalling strategy can backfire, as Bill Clinton learned, if a Javert-like investigator is appointed to investigate you. In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno assigned an independent prosecutor to probe the Clintons’ investments known colloquially as Whitewater.
Over the next half-decade, reams of evidence were generated, and this surplus of documents (and strategic leaks) made him the most scrutinized president in history. But even this didn’t bring Bill Clinton down. If not for the 22nd Amendment, he could have won a third term.
However naughty Hillary Clinton’s email habits—and I’m as scandalized as most about violations of the Federal Records Act—nobody expects a special prosecutor to assist the Republicans’ rescue with a never-ending investigation. They’ll have to do their own work with their congressional committees. Will it amount to much? Unless a smoking gun is found in the Clinton emails, probably not. Six weeks hence, when asked about the emails, Clinton and her staff will flick their hands and say, as they often do, “Oh, that’s old news.”
One would think that with the constant state of war that team Clinton wages against the press would exhaust them. But in the Nietzschean manner, it only seems to make them stronger.
Team Clinton has adapted to predation by the press over the past two decades and learned that no price need be paid for conduct, stonewalling, or lies. This adaption applies to pressure applied by the opposition. Hillary Clinton knows that the Republicans will exploit the email story, but that they will apply a glacial timetable of their own to their campaign bluster and congressional investigations, designed to inflect maximum punishment to her. But how best to hurt Clinton? Knock her out now (if possible) and face some lesser known Democrat in November 2016. Or pace themselves, making demand after demand that Clinton release more and documents. Accuse her of hiding the truth. And then, blast her with an election-eve crescendo that will defeat her directly at the polls.
Never as disciplined as Clinton, the Republicans will probably flub as badly this opportunity to weaken her as they did in the Benghazi hearings, and once again she’ll marginalize Republicans who overplay their hands. The next person who tells you that the email story is so damaging because it symbolizes and reinforces all the bad things we know about the Clintons, remind them of this counterargument: In geologic time, all the negative symbols end up working to the Clintons’ benefit.
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