McCaskill hitching herself to Clinton candidacy

By just about all accounts, Missouri's Sen. Claire McCaskill is a savvy politician who honed her political skills in the Missouri Legislature before being thrust into the national spotlight.

McCaskill was one of the very early supporters of Barack Obama in 2008 and this year has become the go-to spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton.

You have to give Claire credit. When an avalanche of very bad news is striking the Clinton coronation, McCaskill is sticking to the party line in her partisan defense of the Clinton candidacy.

When asked this week about the controversy surrounding the handling of sensitive classified government documents on a private email server in Clinton's home, McCaskill said the brouhaha was nothing more than "a good old-fashioned political witch-hunt."

With all due respect Claire, you may well have hitched your star to the wrong wagon this time around.

Both the office of the Inspector General and now the FBI are probing the issue of Mrs. Clinton's unusual email policy. No one can say that these inspectors are partisan right wing extremists out to bury the Clinton campaign.

Mrs. Clinton's odd email arrangement simply does not pass the smell test. In the face of growing scrutiny over the unique practice, who wipes their email server clean?

And despite repeated assertions that none of those emails was classified, now we learn that dozens if not hundreds of the correspondences were indeed classified -- some even top secret information that originated with top secret drone and satellite surveillance.

Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. McCaskill both were obviously speaking from the same talking points over the weekend. Mrs. Clinton said the government probe of her server was the "same old partisan games" -- a statement strikingly similar to the words spoken by Mrs. McCaskill.

And it's also important to note that not all Democrats share McCaskill's view on the Clinton email server.

If the server story were simply much ado about nothing, why would Joe Biden and Al Gore and others be talking not-so-privately about entering the Democratic primary?

Do they know something that has thus far eluded Missouri's senator?

The Clinton poll numbers are tanking, and others seeking the Democratic nod are drawing amazing crowds as they stump through the early primary states.

On the issue of trustworthiness, Mrs. Clinton has a problem.

I think many voters -- including Democrats -- are still reeling from Mrs. Clinton's "what difference does it make" comment on her inaction during the siege in Benghazi. Add to that her cat-and-mouse game with her private server and you begin to see a pattern of arrogance and deceit that is less than appealing.

I would rarely bet against Claire McCaskill. But this time, perhaps, she is too invested in her talking points that she ignores the storm that is brewing.

Michael Jensen is the publisher of the Sikeston Standard Democrat.