Conservatives will see corruption and liberals will see corporatism and expedience, but the exchanges simply expose the candidate who’s been there all along.
They capture a candidate, and a campaign, that seems in private exactly as cautious, calculating, and politically flexible as they appeared to be in public. The Clinton campaign underestimated and then fretted about rival candidate Bernie Sanders, worried about Joe Biden entering the primary race and Elizabeth Warren endorsing her opponent, plotted endlessly about managing Clinton’s image in the press, took advantage of its close ties to the Obama administration and the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, and took public positions to the left of comments Clinton herself made during private paid speeches to Wall Street firms.
.. These were hacked from the accounts of John Podesta, her campaign chairman, and very few of them are from Clinton herself.
.. Those who view Clinton as hopelessly liberal, craven, and corrupt will seize, as the Trump campaign has, on her stated “dream” of “a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.
.. The most common thread in the Podesta emails, however, is that they show a political candidate being political.
.. Take the example of the Keystone pipeline. It was painfully obvious that for months, Clinton avoided taking a position on the hotly-debated energy project, perhaps in the hopes that the Obama administration would decide to kill it first. The emails bolster this theory. Once she decided to publicly oppose it, her aides wavered on how to announce it and ultimately timed it so that it would take the focus off revelations about her email server.
.. Ultimately, Clinton did not back Glass Steagall and instead argued that her more targeted Wall Street plan was more workable than Sanders’—a position that, according to another email from Schwerin, represented her actual policy belief.
.. For the significant number of people who are fed up with typical politicians, these emails won’t do Clinton any good. But at least in the batches released so far, they don’t really contradict the campaign she’s run.
.. Many of them might be discouraged to see, as Clinton herself acknowledged in a paid speech, “the sausage being made.”
.. Though anti-Clintonites on the right and left may find their suspicions about Clinton confirmed, there’s nothing in the emails that would provide them new lines of criticism—or provide new sources of worry to her allies.
Group’s Tactic on Hillary Clinton: Sue Her Again and Again
Judicial Watch, the indefatigable Clinton adversary that has probably done more than any other individual or organization to create the narrative that Mrs. Clinton is still battling: that she is untrustworthy.
.. Judicial Watch’s strategy is simple: Carpet-bomb the federal courts with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. A vast majority are dismissed. But Judicial Watch caught a break last year, when revelations about Mrs. Clinton’s private email server prompted two judges to reopen two of the group’s cases connected to her tenure as secretary of state.
.. The questions, some with multiple parts, ask her to explain her rationale for using the private server and her reaction to warnings about the potential for security breaches, among other things. Her answers, to be provided via written testimony to the court, are due by Thursday.
.. Suing the government, repeatedly, is an expensive proposition; Judicial Watch has an annual budget of about $35 million that pays for close to 50 employees — a mix of lawyers, investigators and fund-raisers. Mr. Fitton says the group receives donations from nearly 400,000 individuals and institutions every year. One of its biggest funders, according to public filings, is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which was created by the banking heir Richard Mellon Scaife, who died in 2014. In the 1990s, Mr. Scaife was one of the leading financiers of the right-wing effort to bring down the Clintons, bankrolling conservative think tanks and publications — as well as Judicial Watch.
.. Litigiousness is in the organization’s DNA: Its founder, Larry Klayman, once sued his mother. Mr. Klayman has described himself as a conservative Ralph Nader, but during Bill Clinton’s presidency, he often behaved more like a self-appointed Kenneth W. Starr, papering Washington with subpoenas related to every would-be Clinton scandal. His departure from the organization in 2003 was accompanied, unsurprisingly, by litigation: Mr. Klayman accused the organization, and his successor, Mr. Fitton, of “fraud, disparagement, defamation, false advertising and other egregious acts.”
‘Because You’d Be in Jail’
About 20 minutes into the debate, Donald Trump delivered a menacing threat to Hillary Clinton. “If I win,” he warned, “I’m going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there’s never been so many lies, so much deception.”
Mr. Trump’s promising on national television to use the power of the president’s office to prosecute his chief political rival, to her face, was chilling enough.
But when Mrs. Clinton responded, Mr. Trump dropped the threat of an official investigation and any veneer of the rule of law.
“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Mrs. Clinton observed.
“Because,” Mr. Trump replied “you’d be in jail.”
It’s hard to think of anything Mr. Trump could have said to more powerfully underscore the truth of Mrs. Clinton’s point. He said, in a widely watched televised presidential debate, that if he became president, he would put political opponents in cages. That’s dictator talk. But it’s not Mr. Trump’s open contempt for the norms of liberal democracy that made my blood run cold. It was the applause that came after. It is the fact that it’s no longer assured that you automatically lose a presidential debate in which you promise to jail your political rival.
Clinton’s Coming Struggle with Trump Supporters
In the networks’ post-debate wrap-ups, the prevailing emotions seemed to be exhaustion, and sadness. A circus, some commentators called the debate, or a hijacking. But it was also, in ways that are more unsettling, democracy in action.
.. The campaign against Trump seems to have deepened a trait of Clinton’s: a pessimism about the possibility of political persuasion. James Carville, speaking on the Showtime campaign documentary “The Circus,” said that Bill Clinton always believed that he “could talk a dog out of a pork chop”—that, given enough time, he could change anyone’s mind. Hillary, Carville said, is “more realistic” about people.
.. When Obama, at a 2008 fund-raiser, said that he thought members of the Republican base “cling to guns and religion,” his suggestion was that conservatism was a false consciousness that might be lifted. Hillary Clinton appears to have no such optimism. Trump was right: the word “irredeemable” was the interesting one in those infamous remarks. It suggests her belief that the Trump base, the people responsible for the shape of the election, are beyond persuasion.
.. During the past few days, Republicans have been working to blame the election on Trump personally, convinced that Trumpism is a fever that has moved through their electorate but should pass quickly. If Clinton had a different disposition—Obama’s, say, or her husband’s—she might have used the question about “the basket of deplorables” as a way to cleave Trump from his supporters, to empathize with their alienation and sense of loss. She might have offered conciliation. But Clinton does not seem to think that Trumpism is a passing fever, however much elected Republicans wish it so.