Clinton Will Beat the Press Again

I won't rehash the various breathless - or ranting on "conservative" websites - stories about Hillary Clinton's e-mail practices while Secretary 0f State, the bigger question is whether or not she will be damaged by the stories or whether the stories will be old news by the time we are in prime campaign season later this year and, more importantly, next year.  One piece in Politico suggests the the media - which has the attention span of a fruit fly - will have moved on to other things and not take the bait of Republicans who will seek to treat the story much like Benghazi.  If the media moves on, then the story will only live on in the GOP bubble/echo chamber.  Here are article excerpts:

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.