May 2016

[Commentary] The politics of Hillary Clinton's e-mail use as secretary of state will not be budged one inch in any direction by the just-released inspector general's report evaluating that decision. Part of what's being sussed out in the e-mail issue is the huge gulf between the technological capabilities of the rest of the world and that of the US government.

Clinton's arrival at the State Department and President Obama's arrival in the White House happened in 2009 -- well after the Internet was pervasive in the United States, but only shortly after the emergence of social media and, more important, smartphones. The government wasn't ready for this. Like any other massive institution (including some newspapers), adoption of new technologies includes a lot of consideration of the ripple effects through entrenched processes. For a few centuries, with technology evolving at a slower pace and a smaller scale of government, that integration was culturally different. (Rutherford B. Hayes installed the White House's first phone in 1877 -- phone number: 1 -- but it wasn't until 1929 that a phone was installed in the Oval Office.) With the advent of the Internet, the pace of private-sector adoption -- and public-sector pressure to keep up -- accelerated. Even if employees are fully adherent to the rules, government must almost necessarily operate in a way that's much more cumbersome than what you would find in the private sector.

[Commentary] Analyzing patterns of giving and receiving between donors and candidates can tell us things about the race, the strengths and weaknesses of particular candidates, and where a candidate's allegiances lie. In 2016, this type of analysis of campaign finance is somewhat informative about the candidates and the status of the race on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, the picture is much murkier. This is because the presumed Republican nominee hasn't raised much money at all.

As Donald Trump likes to brag, 75 percent of his campaign has been self-financed (although the veracity of this claim has been questioned). Trump touts this as an asset about his candidacy because it supposedly shows that he is not beholden to any particular interests. This may or may not be true, but at the very least it means we have less information about the coalition of people who support Trump, because there is just less campaign finance data on him. So, point No. 1 here is that campaign financing can tell us things about the candidates and the election, except when it doesn't. Point No. 2 is that the amount of money that has already been donated during this election cycle dwarfs previous cycles. So far candidates have raised $720 million, and the various Super PACs that support them have raised an additional $462 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In short, money is often a signal of something meaningful in politics, and 2016's election has a lot of money.