Hillary Clinton said today that she had no idea that her personal email address would cause such problems when she decided to forgo a government email address, and that, looking back, she should have just used two BlackBerries.
However, if she did manage to procure a Time-Turner and went back in time, the smartest move might have been to follow the Bill Clinton model of doing things: never email.
As The Wall Street Journal reminds us today, Bill Clinton has only sent two emails in his entire life. Both were sent during his presidency, a long ago time when AOL email addresses weren’t a status symbol and romantic comedies about the World Wide Web had somewhat realistic plot twists about profitable bookstore chains. Like Hillary, Bill has a private domain name — presidentclinton.com — but apparently only staffers use it.
Bill Clinton made those two emails count, too. The first went to outer space.
In 2011, Clinton even joked about people wanting to read all two of his emails. “I sent a grand total of two emails as president, one to our troops in the Adriatic, and one to John Glenn when he was 77 years old in outer space. I figured it was OK if Congress subpoenaed those.”
However, CNN wondered in 2004, when it was announced that the Clinton presidential library would hold all of Clinton’s emails, if the Glenn email should “actually qualify for electronic communication because it was a test to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail.”
Apparently the problem extended to his administration; in 1993, the New York Times remarked that the White House seemed “trapped in the technological dark ages.”
Clinton’s absence from modern culture on the internet is not absolute, however; he does have a Twitter account that he uses to share selfies.
