Secretaries of state — they're just like us! That's essentially what we learned from the latest batch of Hillary Clinton's emails released by the State Department, in which Clinton receives a truckload of butt-kissing, asks her staff to track down critical intelligence like the time Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife are on, is totally stoked about her new iPad, and inquires about the status of a tense gefilte fish negotiation with the Israeli government.
Those are some of the more amusing ones, but seeing how a cabinet member communicates with those around her about matters both weighty and banal is a reminder that powerful people may move within a rarefied world, but they aren't that different from the rest of us. It reinforces a conclusion I made long ago: Nobody in Washington knows anything.
That's an exaggeration, of course. There are people here who know very many things; in particular, Washington is full of people with deep and very specific policy expertise. If you want to find someone who can tell you more than you'd ever want to know about the economics of health care or the details of regulations on highway medians or the history of U.S. trade with Canada, this is the place to come. But there's another kind of knowledge that's almost impossible to find, partly because it may not exist. When we get a peek behind the curtain to the workaday world of the powerful, that becomes all too clear.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
It's the insidery knowledge that's lacking, the very thing everyone in Washington is after. It's the understanding of the hidden conspiracies that control everything, it's the secrets that would shock America if they were revealed, it's the sure predictions about how political events will unfold. These are the things everyone knows are there, but nobody actually knows.
So what we see in Clinton's emails is disappointingly mundane. There are no blockbuster secrets (though the censors have blacked some sensitive information out) and no new revelation of her network of spies, as she hears every footfall and heartbeat in Washington like Lord Varys pulling the strings in King's Landing. Instead, she's got Sidney Blumenthal passing on rumors and sending her news articles he finds heartening. In fact, her underlings and friends are constantly emailing her news stories to keep her abreast of what's going on in the Obama administration itself — the very news you and I can read.
Yet everyone remains convinced that there are in fact secret and powerful conspiracies waiting to be uncovered — and let's not forget that we're talking about the woman who warned in 1998 of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get her husband. She was essentially right about that, but it was hardly a secret. And what's remarkable is that the same people who view this administration as a bunch of bunglers and fools also believe them capable of the most skilled and intricate manipulation, crafting schemes with multiple moving parts whose reach and nefariousness will shock the country once they're finally revealed. We're to assume that Clinton managed to cover up the administration's crimes in Benghazi, keeping the awful truth from the entire world — right after she figured out how to work her Tivo.
That isn't to say conspiracies never occur — every once in a while we get a good one like Watergate or Iran-Contra, and presumably there are at least some that performed their evil deeds and were never discovered. Nor is it to say people in Washington wouldn't be happy to be part of powerful secret conspiracies if they could. But it's been my experience that most of the scheming and plotting barely gets off the ground before it runs into the complicated realities of politics and ends up amounting to nothing. That's a big part of what makes politics interesting: It's inherently complex, which makes it both difficult to manipulate and difficult to predict. And the more important a political conflict or event is, like the passage of a huge reform bill or a presidential election, the more complex it becomes, with more people involved, more interests pushing in different directions, and more possible ways events could transpire.
As someone who thinks about politics for a living, I'm often asked by civilians to make predictions about what will happen — who's going to win the next election, or whether a certain person will decide to run for president, or whether there will be another government shutdown. I certainly have my opinions about those questions, grounded in what I think are good reasons and the best information I can gather. But like most people, I'm wrong pretty regularly (okay, so there are some people who are wrong an unusual amount of the time). For instance, I didn't think Donald Trump would actually run for president, and I certainly didn't think he'd be doing as well as he is. Fortunately for my reputation, everyone else was wrong about that, too.
So when we see that the secretary of state has to open up the newspaper to find out what's going on in the White House, we can take some comfort in the fact that she's not some kind of cartoon figure. You might love her or hate her, but she's just a person, trying to accomplish her goals with imperfect knowledge, just like the people who came before and after her.
