The antics of the former major-league baseball player Manny Ramirez were frequently described as “just Manny being Manny.” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias suggests that Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised use of a private email server was just Hillary being Hillary, and that that’s a good thing.
In a Tuesday article, Yglesias wrote that “from her adventures in cattle trading to chairing a policymaking committee in her husband's White House to running for Senate in a state she'd never lived in…to her email servers, Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.”
That modus operandi, he argued, is what liberals will need in the post-Obama years: “Democrats have almost no chance of securing a majority in the US Senate and even worse odds of securing a majority in the House. So if there is a future for making progressive policy, that future is executive action…[Hillary] truly is the perfect leader for America's moment of permanent constitutional crisis: a person who cares more about results than process, who cares more about winning the battle than being well-liked, and a person who believes in asking what she can get away with rather than what would look best.”
From Yglesias’s piece (bolding added):
Hillary Clinton's emails have, in a sense, taught us nothing new about her. She's not into transparency, she doesn't like the media (who also doesn't like her), and she's not overly concerned with following the spirit of the rules. To her critics, that makes her a deeply sinister figure…
Rupert Murdoch's New York Post editorialized that Clinton is "looking more like Nixon," as did James Robbins in a USA Today column and Michael Gerson in a Washington Post column.
There's something overblown about this — a secret email server is hardly on par with a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia — but it does get something right. From her adventures in cattle trading to chairing a policymaking committee in her husband's White House to running for Senate in a state she'd never lived in…to her email servers, Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.
This is normally portrayed as a political weakness of hers, and in many ways it is…
But it's also an enormous source of potential strength…
Democrats have almost no chance of securing a majority in the US Senate and even worse odds of securing a majority in the House. So if there is a future for making progressive policy, that future is executive action…
…[I]n the final years of his presidency, Obama has reconciled himself to being a president who grinds out policy wins through executive action while facing constant lawsuits and controversy rather than the kind of president who secures huge bipartisan majorities and ushers in a broad era of good feelings…
This…very much cuts against the grain of Obama's preferences and political persona.
Clinton, by contrast, has long been reconciled to her status as a polarizing figure…
…Her view is that the bad guys don't play fair and square, and there's no reason the good guys should unilaterally disarm.
Presidential power is, in part, a question of laws…But to an extent that's often not sufficiently appreciated, it's largely a question of norms…
Clinton's record in politics is characterized by a clear willingness to push harder than the typical public figure against existing norms. There was no winnable Senate race for her to enter in Illinois or Arkansas in 2000, so she ran in New York instead. Barack Obama forbade her from employing Sidney Blumenthal at the State Department, so she employed him at her family's foundation instead…
She decides what she wants to do, in other words, and then she sets about finding a way to do it — exactly the mentality any Democrat would need to move the needle on policy in 2017…
…[S]he truly is the perfect leader for America's moment of permanent constitutional crisis: a person who cares more about results than process, who cares more about winning the battle than being well-liked, and a person who believes in asking what she can get away with rather than what would look best…[T]he exact same qualities that led to the server drama are the ones that, if she wins, will make her capable of delivering on the party's priorities in a way few others could.
