What Happens When Hillary Clinton Isn’t Inevitable?

[Geee]

The Federalist:

Which party’s prospects do you favor the most: the party whose front-runner is Donald Trump, or the party whose front-runner is now under investigation by the FBI for mishandling “Top Secret” information?

Well, neither one, I suppose. But there’s good reason to believe Trump’s lead is only temporary. As Sean Trende explains, this is the traditional period in the summer before the primaries when voters go shopping around for an alternative, and previous front-runners at this point have flamed out and disappeared once the real voting gets under way. Meanwhile, Republicans have more serious alternatives to Trump who are gaining in the polls.

 

But Clinton is not a temporary infatuation within a much wider and deeper Democratic field. She is once again the “inevitable” Democratic front-runner for whom the field had to be cleared.

 

It’s entirely possible, of course, that Hillary Clinton will beat the rap. The Clintons have a long history of figuring out how to float free and unencumbered above the law. Already, some of their faithful water-carriers in the press are figuring out how to recast the story to deflect blame from the Queen. Take this imaginative effort:

 

One thing that's abundantly clear from Clinton email issue is our government probably ought to come up with actual classification standards.

— Jonathan Allen (@jonallendc) August 12, 2015

That’s right. The problem isn’t that Hillary Clinton set up an unsecure e-mail account on a private server to which she funneled classified e-mails. The problem is that the federal government, gosh darn it, just creates too much confusion about what is really classified and what isn’t. It all depends on what the meaning of the word “classified” is.