5 sentences that explain American politics in 2015

Hillary Clinton attends a news conference in 2012.

(Image credit: (REUTERS/Feng Li/Pool))

last updated 4 March 2015

Here's a sentence that captures official Washington's anxiety about a President Hillary Clinton, as well as its hope for a fresh approach to politics:

Like a blast of wintry air in July, the worst of 1990s-style politics is intruding on what needs to be a new millennium campaign: Transparent, inspirational, innovative, and beyond ethical reproach. [National Journal]

That's Ron Fournier referring to the revelation, by The New York Times, that Clinton used a private e-mail address for her State Department correspondence. In doing so, the e-mails weren't automatically archived, and instead had to be provided to the State Department by Clinton's staff.

Hillary Clinton is probably the most examined female public figure in recent American history, and her insistence on having a private life, and a zone within which she can deliberate privately, has created the impression that there are two distinct Clintons. 1990s-style politics, per Fournier, is secretive, humdrum, anodyne, and ethically dubious. (It was also, he has noted elsewhere, quite effective at fixing problems.)

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One reason why Fournier and others believe that the republic is ready for something new is the thick screen between the president and the media.

Evidence suggests that the relationship between the president and the press is more distant than it has been in a half century. [Columbia Journalism Review]

I would add that mutual suspicion between the president and the press is on par with the Nixon administration, although, of course, the stakes are quite different. The press correctly believes that Obama is indifferent to them; Nixon was actively hostile.

Obama main complaint is that he thinks the press has undersold the epochal transformation of Congress during his tenure. Steve Benen writes that after 2010,

A new staple of GOP governance was born: hostage crises, all of a sudden, were a credible substitute for the traditional legislative process. [MSNBC]

During the 2014 campaign, the Republicans promised to govern. But that hasn't worked out, says Scott Wong at The Hill.

Instead of rallying behind a unified agenda, centrist and conservative Republicans now are engaged in open warfare with one another, bickering over the best strategy to push back against Obama's executive actions on immigration. [The Hill]

Obama has gotten the better of the deal, to the astonishment of the GOP base. But there is no end in sight for these hostage crises, because, as Ron Brownstein has been quoted as saying:

The one-sentence explanation of contemporary American politics is that Republicans cannot win enough minority voters to consistently control the White House, and Democrats cannot win enough whites to consistently control the House of Representatives... [National Journal]

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.