Rieder: The dangers of Hillary's stonewall

The dust-up over Hillary Rodham Clinton's failure to use government e-mail while secretary of State provides a vivid preview of coming attractions.

Given Clinton's long record in public life and the Clintons' patented penchant for secrecy, there will be plenty of stories like The New York Times' e-mail scoop that will portray the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in a negative light.

In effect, the intense media scrutiny will serve as Clinton's primary. As in 2012, the crowded field of Republican contenders will spend lots of time and energy beating each other up. The victor will emerge battle-hardened, damaged or both.

Clinton has no real Democratic competition and none is on the horizon, although that could change if such flaps as those over private e-mail, foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was secretary of State and who knows what else take their toll.

And the e-mail contretemps provides a road map as to how the forces of Clinton will respond. They will stonewall. And they will try to change the subject, by attacking the message and the messenger, by trying to discredit and poke holes in the story, by blaming the evil media.

Whether that will work is another question.The e-mail issue seems to have legs,

Clinton has not come forward to explain why she felt it necessary for a very public official to have private e-mail on a private server. She did tweet, "I want the public to see my e-mail," to which New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd responded, "Less true words were never spoken."

After the private e-mail system became known, Clinton's camp turned 55,000 pages of e-mails over to State. But since the e-mails were handpicked by Clinton staffers, who knows what's included and what isn't?

And the rope-a-dope strategy isn't playing so well with all of Clinton's allies. "What I would like is for her to come forward and say just what the situation is," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "Because she is the pre-eminent political figure right now. She is the leading candidate, whether it be Republican or Democrat … to be the next president. And I think she needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is."

Amen.

Into the vaccum stepped Saturday Night Live's Kate McKinnon, whose "message from Hillary Clinton" responding to the e-mail brouhaha was devastating — "This is not how Hillary Clinton goes down." The sketch underscored so many of Clinton's least likable traits. And it had the candidate saying that while that pesky media was getting under her skin, it was nothing she couldn't handle. She has survived so much.

The assault on the Times story — waged most aggressively by David Brock, a former conservative attack dog turned liberal attack dog — focused on the notion that the piece hadn't really explained precisely what regulations Clinton may have violated. Brock is founder and chairman of the liberal group Media Matters and until recently served on the board of a pro-Clinton PAC. I agree with Times public editor Margaret Sullivan that the paper certainly could have done a better job on that score.

But Brock's larger point — that the story "unraveled under scrutiny" — is ludicrous. There's no denying that Clinton used a private e-mail account on a private server. Why would anyone in her position do that? Transparency in government is vital, not to mention e-mail security, for a secretary of State, no less. There were regulations discouraging the practice, and it flew in the face of Obama administration policy.

My USA TODAY colleague Susan Page wrote recently that the danger of imbroglios like the one over private e-mail is that they reinforce beliefs that the Clintons just aren't very transparent. The same risk lies in the stonewall-and-attack response to them.

The Clintons are known for playing the long game, for not overreacting to the Beltway distraction of the moment. But not all Beltway distractions are created equal. Some, like this one, are serious business.

And the long game cuts two ways. Election Day is a long way off, and too much collateral damage can make inevitable feel like not so much.