As the New York Times piece that broke the Clinton email story notes: “The revelation about the private email account echoes longstanding criticisms directed at both the former secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, for a lack of transparency and an inclination toward secrecy.” Yes, but why such secrecy to begin with? In part, of course, this is garden-variety political self-protection. Yet in the Clintons’ case—and particularly with Hillary—something more is at play. Hillary’s penchant for secrecy has its roots in her decades-long efforts to disguise her power-sharing arrangement with Bill. For years she served as both unelected Arkansas co-governor and unelected American co-president. The public rightly frowned on this evasion of constitutional, electoral, and bureaucratic propriety, which in turn drove Hillary to obsessive secrecy and badly hampered the functioning of Clinton administrations at both the state and national levels. Hillary’s vaunted executive experience is tainted and distorted by the fact that she was always an executive on the sly. Hillary’s confused and confusing power-sharing arrangement with Bill—and her need to disguise it—have gotten her into the habit of evading executive responsibility. She only knows how to govern under the radar and can’t seem to break the habit. Hillary’s defenders discount her early governing fiascoes and claim that they’ve only helped her learn what not to do. Yet this latest incident confirms that the habits behind Hillary’s early executive mistakes have not been broken.Kurtz goes over the history of this pattern, from Bill's 1974 campaign to her role in the Clinton White House 20 years later. It seems she developed an entrenched mindset of keeping her cards close to the vest.
She might not want to say too much about transparency after she announces her run for prez.
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