The paranoid Hillary

I am one of the few Americans who has all ready voted for Hillary Clinton. I voted for her to be a New York State Senator. Up until then she had not run for office and had not served in any administration. Subsequently, she ran for President against Barack Obama and I voted for Obama. I voted for him because he said he would do what I did not think Hillary could do: end the petty

partisanship in Washington. I believe that Republicans, who had been thrown out of power in both houses, wanted so badly to prevent President Obama from being able to keep that campaign promise, as well as any others, that they did everything they could to actually increase the petty partisanship.

Hillary is particularly qualified to be President of the United States. She served as First Lady, served admirably in the Senate and served as Secretary of State. There is no Republican who can say they have held both a seat in the Senate and also served as a Secretary of State.

But is was while she was Secretary of State that, I think Hillary's paranoia got the better of her. In 1998, Hillary, in defense of her husband, claimed that there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" to try to take down the Presidency of her husband. Certainly, as a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr did everything he could—Whitewater morphed into Filegate to Travelgate to allegations that Bill Clinton had an affair with Paula Jones prior to his presidency and finally to the Lewinsky affair. But this is Kenneth Starr, who ought not to have ever been granted the power granted to him by Janet Reno to do open-ended investigations.

Hillary needed control. As Secretary of State, she could not handle the possibility that someone would endlessly investigate her job in that position and, she was right. The Benghazi investigation in the House of Representatives concluded after two and a half years just before Thanksgiving, 2014, where the results (no findings of wrongdoing) could be buried in the other news of the day.

So she had an IT person build her a special server to handle her email in Chappaqua, NY and not one under the control of the Obama administration or the government. I have heard a lot of concerns about security with respect to this server but, if the IRS's computers could have been hacked, certainly the system used by the State Department could have been hacked. Her computer was probably as safe as any.

But it's the paranoia in having someone set that up that bothers me. I think that, as President, her paranoia will continue—if it doesn't get worse. I lived through a time when we had a President who was paranoid. And that did not work out well for us. I'm not sure why Richard Nixon was so paranoid—there was certainly no "vast left wing conspiracy" trying to remove him from office. The calls for him to step down came from both sides of the aisle.

Nixon was, certainly, the 20th Century's worse President though, in terms of policy, I think Reagan was worse. Nixon tried to create an imperial Presidency with more ceremony, more exultation of his person, more protocols and a clear way of thinking that strongly suggested that he thought that the President was above us all and above the laws of the United States.

And it is precisely that that bothers me about Hillary. While she was raised middle class and while I believe she does retain middle class values and aspirations, which I prefer any President to do, her paranoia may encourage her to take steps to hide from the record-keepers, take an adversarial stance towards the press (which has a right to know) and the public, which also has a right to know what is going on within her administration.

Today, we have Bernie Sanders with his straight talk and, possibly, Joe Biden as well as Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic nomination. I don't think Vice President Biden will run. And I am completely undecided. I don't want a paranoid President.