Bunker mentality hurts Clinton: experts
‘Penchant for privacy’ led to email scandal, made Ground Zero incident worse
WASHINGTON— When Hillary Clinton shuffled and stumbled as she abruptly left the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero on Sunday, clearly ill, the telltale video was captured by a bystander, not a journalist.
Clinton’s aides hadn’t told the travelling press pool that she was leaving. When Clinton was driven home that night, she was not accompanied by the group of reporters that traditionally follows a candidate from door to door.
Clinton’s aides hadn’t allowed them to come along.
In between, her campaign claimed she had merely “overheated.” Only eight hours after the incident, and 48 hours after she saw a doctor, did they admit what appears to be the truth: she has pneumonia.
All together, it was vintage Hillary Clinton. As she has for two decades, the Democratic presidential nominee chose maximum secrecy right up until maximum secrecy was no longer a viable option.
“Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia,” David Axelrod, a former top aide to U.S. President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter. “What’s the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”
Clinton’s Republican opponent is in several important ways more opaque than she is. But her bunker mentality has been one of the biggest drags on her campaign. It led to, and prolonged, her biggest scandal, over her decision to set up a private email server. And it made her Sunday incident worse.
“Sheer stupidity,” said Kathleen Dolan, chair of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “This one is just a self-inflicted wound. And inexplicable.
“People get pneumonia all the time. You say, ‘The Secretary was diagnosed with pneumonia, that may require her to change some of her schedule in the next week, just giving you a heads-up.’ That’s all they had to do. But they didn’t. And it was stupid,” Dolan said. “And now it’s just one more piece of evidence that, ‘See, she lies about everything.’ And she doesn’t lie about everything.”
Indeed, fact checks show Donald Trump has been far more dishonest during the campaign than Clinton. Trump, unlike Clinton, has refused to release his tax returns. Trump, unlike Clinton, has refused to allow a full-time press pool at all. Trump, unlike Clinton, has blacklisted news outlets from his rallies.
But voters trust her almost as little as they trust him. In an ABC poll this week, 61 per cent of voters said Clinton was not trustworthy or honest.
“If you were to do a kind of virtue X-ray, she would win,” said Gil Troy, author of The Age of Clinton. “But everyone’s convinced that she’s the evil incarnate.”
Part of the issue might be sexism, said Troy, a McGill University professor. Part might be political talent. But some, Troy said, is this: “She’s made her own bed.”
Clinton did not do a news conference for 274 days. She has not allowed reporters into glitzy fundraisers. She uttered several false statements about her emails.
Democrats called Monday for more transparency. There were signs her campaign was listening: a spokesman promised additional medical documents.
But it will take more than a gesture to change a reputation forged more than two decades ago. Clinton was already being accused of excess secrecy in 1993, when the names of the people on her closed-door healthcare task force were kept private for months.
And it will take more than a few days to change the personality of a lawyer whose views on disclosure have long been based on the premise that the media and unhinged rightwingers are out to get her.
As early as the 1990s, paranoid opponents were accusing her of crimes, including having associates murdered. They are still doing so. And leading up to Sunday’s episode, conservative figures were claiming with no evidence that she had a deathly disorder.
“You really have to go back to the trauma, and I don’t use that word lightly, the trauma of the 1990s,” Troy said. “And the degree to which every one of their most personal, intimate feelings, actions, encounters were splayed all over the media. And in some ways, it’s a logical response to that insanity.”
Even back then, though, there was evidence that secrecy was hurting her more than helping.
In 1993, the Clintons faced questions over their involvement with a failed real estate company. Instead of disclosing documents Bill Clinton aides thought would end the Whitewater matter, he accepted his wife’s advice to keep them private.
The saga eventually resulted in the appointment of prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who discovered Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, which made Hillary Clinton even more guarded.