For politics junkies the U.S. Presidential Priimary elections are as much fun as any reality TV show. There is all of the drama, the focus on trivia and the elevation of previously-unheard-of individuals to "celebrity" status.
Through it all the serious candidates concentrate on the important things, like raising money and ensuring that nothing emerges that questions their integrity or judgement.
In times past, news of an extra-marital affair was all it took to eliminate a promising candidate as Gary Hart discovered in 1987. Yet only a decade later Bill and Hilary Clinton proved that even the most sordid of affairs would not prevent a candidate from becoming President or remaining in office.
Now, another decade or so on, Hilary Clinton is all set to make history, starting with first women to win a presidential primary and potentially going all the way to the White House to become the most powerful person in the world.
Except there's a problem. For Hilary's opponents it's the gift that keeps on giving and from her point of view she must be thinking something like - how did this happen? The problem is that at some point when she was Secretary of State (the second most powerful position in the world), she got bad advice or maybe made a bad decision about - of all things - how to handle email.
What Ms Clinton did was to use her personal email service, reportedly based on a server in her family home, for communications relating to official State Department business. Thus the story goes, mixed up in prosaic communications regarding family matters were messages relating to troop deployments in Afghanistan, civil war in Syria, embassy bombings in Libya and nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran.
State Department communications - as with all high level international diplomacy - need to be controlled and preserved for posterity so that eventually we can all know what exactly went on, even if it needs to be classified secret at the time, as is often the case. Letting these communications outside of the secure government networks is a big no-no. There's no way that someone of Clinton's experience would not know that so why on earth did she allow this muddling up of personal and State affairs?
The answer appears to be incredibly mundane for actions that will potentially have serious ramifications for Clinton herself, the USA and maybe even the rest of the world. Clinton has stated that she simply felt it would be easier to have just one device to carry around as she travelled the world - she didn't want to have one device for personal use and another for her official role.
By the way this isn't just a U.S. issue. Almost exactly the same scenario played out in NZ some years ago when our very own Murray McCully was found to be using an ordinary Gmail account for official NZ foreign affairs communications. Supposedly this was "easier" than using the official secure email services provided by his department.
It seems that neither of these leaders asked the advice of any experts. Even an ordinary iPhone can handle multiple email streams on the same device. Its not believable that all the resources of the most powerful nation on earth could not have solved that problem for Clinton if she had asked. And why didn't somebody with IT oversight step in and prevent the situation in the first place?
The explanation that her opponents will favour is that she did it deliberately to avoid official scrutiny. However applying Occam's Razor the most likely explanation is that Hilary never asked, she just decided that she knew enough about technology to decide for herself. Probably in the "yes ma'am" U.S. culture nobody had the fortitude to suggest to her that this was a bad idea.
As a result Clnton has saddled herself with a seemingly never ending series of questions all of which will be gleefully seized upon by her rivals to demonstrate that she lacks integrity and judgment; the two things that most often scupper a presidential candidate.
Despite all this on paper Hilary is the strongest candidate by far. But these issues have a habit of growing relentlessly. She may yet go down in history not as the first woman president but the first candidate to lose an election due to a flawed IT strategy. And that should give every CEO pause to think.
This post was originally published on www.designertech.co.nz