She has adjusted her positions on trade and the minimum wage to scrounge for votes, just as Mr. Sanders adjusted his position on guns. Mr. Sanders’ positions seem less focus-group tested than Ms. Clinton’s, and she can be infuriatingly evasive. Partly that’s because she’s more hawkish than some Democrats, and partly that’s because she realizes she’s likely to face general election voters in November and is preserving wiggle room so she can veer back to the center then.
Does that make her scheming and unprincipled? Perhaps, but synonyms might be “pragmatic” and “electable.” That’s what presidential candidates do.
Then there’s the question of Ms. Clinton raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from speeches to Goldman Sachs and other companies. For a person planning to run for president, this was nuts. It also created potential conflicts of interest. But there’s no sign of any quid pro quo. Yes, in a broader sense, companies write checks to buy access and influence, but if that’s corrupt then so is our entire campaign finance system. Bill Clinton, Colin Powell and other prominent figures were speaking for high fees, so she probably thought she could get away with it as well. Jill Abramson, who spent decades as a journalist either investigating Hillary Clinton or overseeing investigations of her, and who certainly isn’t soft on the Clintons, concluded in The Guardian: “Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”
Then there are the State Department emails, which are the subject of an FBI investigation. What was she thinking in using a private email server? Why on earth would she do such a stupid thing?
Ms. Clinton is thin-skinned, private, controlling, wounded by attacks on her and utterly distrustful of the news media. Where Bill Clinton charms, she stews. My bet is that she and her staff wanted to prevent her emails from becoming public through Freedom of Information Act requests. All this is self-inflicted damage, which Hillary Clinton compounded with evasions and half-truths, coming across as lawyerly and shifty. A more gifted politician might have gotten away with it, but Ms. Clinton is not a natural politician. Her warmth can turn to remoteness on the television screen, her caution to slipperiness.
As for the fundamental question of whether Ms. Clinton risked endangering America with her email server, I suspect the problem has been exaggerated. As President Barack Obama put it, “She has not jeopardized America’s national security.” Ms. Clinton’s private email server may have been penetrated by the Russians, though we don’t know that.
