Dan K. Thomasson: Queen Hillary’s Achilles’ heel

If one has to explain in a word why Hillary Clinton has made decisions that have undercut her image and left her vulnerable to questions about her ethics and at times even her honesty, it is “imperiousness.”

The former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state and now presidential contender has a record of behavior that leaves no other conclusion than that she believes she is intellectually superior to most people. That when she enters a room full of her peers, there is no one smarter. That her motives are pure and free her from the standards that most of us poor mortals are held to.

That attitude manifests itself in the current dust-up over her use of her personal email system while leading the State Department rather than conducting official business over government servers, as legally mandated. She appears to have ignored warnings that doing so could cause trouble in the handling of classified information. Why should anyone question her decision?

Do I believe for a minute she thought there was a national security risk in what she did? I do not, and there is no real evidence that vital information was hacked by either a domestic or foreign source. Nor do I personally believe she will be held accountable in the aftermath of an FBI investigation. This is merely to analyze what is contributing to her electoral negatives, among the highest for a presidential candidate of her experience in the nation’s history.

Obviously, as those who defend her maintain, one with such broad exposure in high-profile public service over the last quarter century is bound to have made some enemies. After all, along with the weighty political stress has come personal crisis with a marriage threatened by a husband who strayed. Some of the negativity about her clearly stems from the fact she stayed with him, leaving many to believe she did so out of her own Lady Macbeth-like personal ambition rather than love. Horrors! Who ever heard of that?

Clinton’s imperiousness was evident from the moment she stepped through the White House door with her president husband in 1993. Rumors of tantrums, including lamp-throwing and foul-mouthed diatribes and fights with the Secret Service agents assigned to the protective detail were everywhere in Washington. The Secret Service director at the time, John Magaw, was reportedly removed and sent to the Treasury to oversee what today is called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after he complained to the president about her abusiveness to agents.

There were other incidents in the first months of the Clinton administration that showed the president’s lady had a bit more queenliness in her demeanor than denizens of this town had seen in a while. All that reached its zenith when she was given the job of overseeing her spouse’s primary initiative – a reform of the nation’s health care system. Her efforts produced a disaster.

One of the reasons was Hillary’s failure to include key Republicans and warnings from health industry experts in the White House drafting, which she held in closed sessions. The huge sweeping proposal was dead on arrival in Congress. Once again there were allegations of imperious behavior by the first lady. Soon the late night television comedians and Washington wags were calling the couple “Billary,” a two-for-one presidency.

Throughout her Senate and State Department careers and, for that matter, her failed 2008 candidacy for the Democratic nomination, her staff has remained mostly loyal in their public comments about her, although some have conceded privately that she was demanding and difficult to work for.

Perhaps the best verification that she still suffers from the characteristic of self-anointment was her insistence that not only had she done nothing wrong in using her own email account for official business, it almost was improper to challenge her over such a trivial action also used by others in her job. She, of course, had cooperated with the investigation at least to some degree and she submitted herself to 11 hours of public Congressional interrogation, by the end of which she may have proven she was indeed smarter than most of those on the House committee examining her.

But how much better off would she have been had she in the beginning just conceded that she had made a colossal mistake instead of giving the whole thing a royal flick of the wrist?

Dan Thomasson is an oped columnist for Tribune News Service.