Hillary Clinton must have experienced deja vu the other day, facing a demanding press bombarding her with questions about her penchant for privacy. The specifics of the interrogation were different, but the response was essentially the same as in her encounters as first lady in the 1990s, in her 2008 presidential campaign and her four years as secretary of state.
Again, she presented the appearance of complete openness coupled with a firm insistence that her private life was, or should be, the same as that of any other American — her own business.
It was all just a matter of "convenience," she said, to maintain one email collection for her correspondence as secretary of state in the Obama administration and another for her private affairs, like planning her daughter's wedding and her mother's funeral. Though in retrospect, she conceded, it probably wasn't a smart idea.
Accentuating the positive where possible, she told about turning over 55,000 emails from her private account as required by a State Department directive. But she sloughed off that she had done so two years after the request and that she and staff weeded out the private ones, which she said accounted for about half the total.
Inquiring minds wanted to know: How could the public be sure the emails weren't cherry-picked, with unflattering or politically damaging emails cast off and presumably destroyed? Maintaining her composure like the political pro she is, Hillary said the public had to trust her to do the right thing.
An obvious solution was to turn over her private email server to an impartial third party. In that idea, not surprisingly, she had no interest. After the history of probing from political enemies and the press ranging from the Arkansas Whitewater scandal that came to nothing to the Monica Lewinsky scandal that somehow failed to destroy her marriage, she had ample reason to go into a defensive crouch.
But because as first lady she had demonstrated an affinity for secrecy, as in her closed-door management of the Bill Clinton health care plan, the joke circulated that she was paranoid because she had so much to be paranoid about.
In 2008, she ran as a presidential candidate with high expectations of a waltz to the Democratic nomination, with only a little known first-term senator from Illinois in her way. But her campaign again won a reputation for being excessively exclusionary, with an air of entitlement that encouraged suspicion and ill will, even in some Democratic ranks, along with expected Republican hostility.
Despite her high marks as secretary of state and huge support among women for her work on gender equality, the sense of inevitability about her presidential nomination in 2016 made her a long-term target, as her unpersuasive non-candidacy tease stretched on.
With little more substantive news about her to emerge, nor any seriously threatening challenger to her for the Democratic nomination, the eventual focus on her two-pronged email policy became catnip for Hillary-haters in both parties. For much too long, she tried to wait out the mounting questions, until the issue inevitably revived public concerns about her seemingly excessive concern for privacy.
In the first substantive mistake of her pre-campaign period, she allowed a political vacuum into which her critics willingly rushed. So did one of politics' most disreputable smear artists, David Brock. Originally a right-wing character assassin who targeted young lawyer Anita Hill in the toxic Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination and then turned on the Clintons, Mr. Brock put himself in front of Clinton damage control in the email fiasco.
He immediately showed his stuff, demanding that Republican Chairman Trey Gowdy of a House special committee investigation into the Benghazi attacks, already well chewed over in Congress, reveal his own emails. What they might have to do with the Hillary emails was anybody's guess. Surely the Clinton team can find a more savory, less obvious shill than this self-appointed watchdog of the prying press.
In any event, what no doubt will soon be called Emailgate gives Hillary foes a toehold on a controversy that appears to have legs as the 2016 campaign heats up a year early.
Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.