I’m so tired of the Republicans flinging shit in every directiont that I hardly listen to them anymore. As others have said, they screamed wolf enough times. I will never vote for a Republican, anyway, not as long as they have the strong arm of the Religious Right behind them. Email scandal? Sure, she should have known better, but come on, why don’t they just start screaming about Benghazi or some other manufactured outrage again?
Not that I am overly fond of the Dems, either, but we are all in a bad situation. I actually don’t want to vote for a Clinton or a Bush. Somebody new, this is not a dynasty, please.
I am an opponent of Mrs. Clinton, and very likely won’t vote for her. I will likely vote Republican (although I make room for the possibility that the GOP will field a candidate so awful that I will vote for Clinton after all).
Your presumption is that I’m delighted by this turn of events.
But I posted a thread in GD ten hours before you started this thread, in which I said:
There was NARA “guidance,” which creates policy (not law) that forbid her approach. However, her conduct is still defensible: the LAW says that the head of each Federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.
In other words, the head of the agency is responsible for determining how best to implement the requirements of the law. As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton did just that. Her conduct was consistent with the law as it then existed.
I kind of hope this is a MAJOR problem for her, so much so that she decides to not pursue running.
While I’d vote for her (and did so in 2008 against that new-comer Barack guy), I think this is yet another sign that she’s so polarizing that if she got elected president, the next four to eight years of her term would be even worse gridlock than Obama’s. If she does drop out for this reason or some other, I hope the Democrats can find somebody a bit more palatable to offer.
It matters. To use a personal email for business is just plain stupid. As an employee, what happens if your account is hacked or compromised? Yeah - it can happen to any account, government or not. But at least through the “official” account someone (some third party) can very quickly judge what was lost. I was under a rule of “work from the work account ONLY” rule 15 years ago for good reason.
Was it ill advised to use personal email? Sure. But if she was never assigned a government email as SOS, what else was she supposed to do? (That’s presuming she indeed was not assigned such an email)
She’s apparently produced the emails for scrutiny, so unless there is something damning in them, this should end the matter. It probably won’t, but it should.
I vote on policy, not personality. I am in sufficient disagreement with the policy objectives of the GOP, as currently constituted, that I will vote for whomever the Democratic Party nominates. This is especially true when there is absolutely no realistic chance that the Republicans lose control of the House until after the next census, and only a moderate chance that they lose the Senate in 2016.
So, yeah, if she’s the nominee, I’ll vote for Clinton. I’ll even donate to her general election campaign. I might support Warren or Sanders in the primaries, though.
I wouldn’t call myself an HRC “supporter”. I’d likely vote for her over any of the Republican candidates, and I think she would be an OK president. I just wish we could get past the Clintons and onto some new blood. I see her as very smart, extremely political (more than I prefer), but not too likely to get us into any crazy wars. It’s that last thing I worry about the most, and I don’t trust any in the GOP field, even if Hillary might be more hawkish than many Democrats. I’d prefer a more principled Democrat like the former Senator Russ Feingold, even if I might not agree with all of his policies.
I was going to post something like this. It is a negative, she should be using government email for government work, but in the scheme of things, it’s a minor thing.
I don’t care about what she did and it doesn’t affect my full support for her. I blame the GOP for coarsening the political partisanship to this level. In another time and place I would have cared, but seeing as how every GOP candidate would essentially be evil, there is nothing Hillary can realistically do that would make me lose support for her
Agreed. The Republicans have acted like complete children during these last two campaigns. They literally brought the government to a halt because they couldn’t play nicely in the sandbox. I don’t think any Dem candidate will do for them. I think they think it’s “their turn”.
Oh, for a third party candidate that might actually have a chance!
ETA: Changed republicans to Republicans because I really do mean the GOP.
I don’t expect her to be free of impure motives very often. I think she’s a deal-maker and a manipulator and a policy planner. I like her overall politics pretty well. I think she’ll be more effective than Obama, who has not leveraged his strengths and has been shut down by the Republicans. I’m ready for an impure dirty-fighting Democrat and she might be the one to fit the bill.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever voted D for president? If so, for whom? Dukakis?
Back to the question at hand, I will vote for any D over any R for president. There are things I like and things I don’t about Hillary. She’s too close to Wall Street and isn’t liberal enough. But she’s a fighter and she isn’t going to come into office with any dreams of post-partisanship like Obama did. She knows enough to know she’s in a fight.
The email thing is not a big issue. I think she is in the wrong, personally. I’m sure State has a big IT professional staff who take pride in keeping email communications secure and properly archived. I just don’t think it’s right to bypass the system and assume that you can make something as secure on your own.
It shows poor judgment, but a quick visit to teh Google (which they apparently don’t have at The New York Times) shows that it doesn’t violate the laws and regulations as they existed at the time.
Verdict: A minor downcheck, not enough to matter unless the GOP somehow manages to field a non-“HELL-NO!” candidate this time around.
I guess I qualify as a fencesitter. I’d like to see a credible challenge to Clinton in the primaries, but I expect she’ll win the nomination and will certainly support her against whichever crazy, amoral tool of oligarchs that the GOP nominates.
‘Unforced error’ would be about the kindest thing I’d say about it. And I don’t like it when the rules only seem to apply to lesser mortals, but not the big shots like Hillary Clinton or David Petraeus.
But in the larger scheme of things, this is pretty small potatoes. People’s lives are on the line in a Supreme Court case that was argued today. People’s lives are on the line in the decisions we make to intervene, or not, in other countries’ problems. Nobody’s life is on the line because Clinton kept her government emails in a personal account.