About the time Hillary Clinton was consenting to a tactical apology commanded by a focus group, Donald Trump was saying on the Tonight Show that he’d gladly apologize in the unlikely event he ever did anything wrong.
Hillary generated mostly skepticism. Trump generated mostly laughs.
That’s the kind of thing that drives the Clintons and their most devoted agents absolutely nuts.
They resent the unfairness by which the media hold them to a different standard.
I can hear Hillary now, decrying that everyone obsesses over her emails as secretary of state while nobody explores an adulthood of shenanigans by this guy Trump who barrels to a big lead in Republican polls.
So I thought I’d explain the difference.
Political reporters have spent decades beholding the transparent and utter calculation and politicization in the Clintons’ every move, to the point of having Dick Morris take a poll on where they should spend their vacation. So reporters are wary and distrustful. And the best angles for reporting explore the gap between what the Clintons do or say and what they really are.
On the other hand, Trump gets in trouble not for a gap between what he says or does and is but instead for the seeming absence of any such gap.
When Trump says Carla Fiorina is ugly, or that John McCain is no hero, or that a Fox anchorwoman was bleeding from wherever, the issue is instantly self-evident. It’s as superficial and offensive as he is.
There is nothing to investigate. There merely is something to quote.
Trump is seemingly authentic. The boor you see is the boor you get.
Conversely, when Hillary keeps her government emails on her own server and then deletes thousands of them, it invokes her three-decade gap in credibility and authenticity. It’s the gap in which she made easy money on odd commodities trading, resisted a Whitewater special prosecutor, worked to get the White House travel office staff fired and set out to remake health care via a secret working group.
She resents and resists transparency and accountability, based on her famous cry for a “zone of privacy.”
The way to cover Trump is more fun and much easier. It is simply to wait for him to open his mouth.
The way to cover Hillary — and Bill before, though he’s less hostile to transparency and accountability — is to pore over records at the Clinton Library. It’s to disbelieve what she says, find holes in it, then cast a jaded eye toward her inevitable and wholly tactical and calculated concession to whatever you find.
The best way for her to have handled the email matter — other than to have kept her government emails on the government server in the first place — would have been a variation of the Trump way.
It would have been to say she didn’t trust blankety-blank Republicans and reporters because they’d spent decades justifying her distrust.
It would have been to say she so wanted her zone of privacy that she was stupid and that she essentially extended an open invitation for the deserved hell she was catching.
But instead she did one of her favorite things. She hunkered in her bunker. No one cares about this email business except Republicans and reporters, she was saying.
Her manner remained as it’s always been — unapproachable except to close friends, which left her relatively new team of advisers and strategists afraid to tell her the truth.
Finally, when her advisers and strategists had overwhelming focus-group information to give her, she went out and said she was sorry. About something.
She said she was sorry because a focus group said she needed to say she was sorry — if, that is, she hoped to stand any chance of getting past this issue and reviving her presidential run on her own terms.
Now that she’s said she’s sorry, the commentary is as much about analyzing the political calculation of her apology as about any supposed real or substantive change of heart.
Hillary might have tried Trump’s style, which would have been to put a flippant post on Twitter saying “Hillary means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Actually, she tried something like that, getting sassy about wiping her server clean with a cloth, and it didn’t work.
It’s too late for Hillary to give us the casual quip or born-again candor.
It might be too late altogether for her, depending on the general election matchup — whether she gets to it and whom she faces if so.
If it comes down to the woman you need to investigate versus the man you need only to quote — well, she can win that one.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.