What Difference, at This Point, Does Hillary Clinton’s Apology Make?
A lot of Hillary Clinton supporters were hostile to my suggestion that the former secretary of state should have told Andrea Mitchell “yes” when asked if she was sorry for the email flap during her interview Friday, mainly on the basis that Hillary has done nothing wrong, and that an apology would do nothing to mollify Hillary’s critics in the media.
On Tuesday, Hillary took that suggestion, and apologized during an interview with ABC News anchor David Muir, and on Wednesday morning, it looked like all those Hillary supporters were well-founded in their skepticism. Over on Fox News, the news was greeted with a chyron that said “IT’S ABOUT TIME!”, and on MSNBC’s daily Hillary bash-fest Morning Joe, they mocked the apology as a “hostage video” and criticized the “flat tone” of Hillary’s voice.
Clearly, nothing short of drawing and quartering will ever be enough for some folks, and over at CNN, anchor Chris Cuomo echoed the sentiment that by apologizing, Hillary had done nothing more than given her opponents confirmation that she’d done something wrong.
But then, something strange and wonderful happened. CNN Senior National Correspondent Jeff Zeleny, even as he slammed Hillary for not doing this sooner, and for only doing it for strategic reasons, demonstrated that the apology had worked:
Cuomo: “No matter what context you put it in or how tearful when discussing her mother and pledge to help women, it seems like she did something wrong. Why give that to your opponents?”
Zeleny: “That’s a thing that held her back for saying she’s sorry. We have seen, in the last week or so, saying ‘I’m sorry for the confusion this caused people.’ That is the lawyerly answer. That doesn’t cut it when you are running for president. She has given in to say she’s sorry. She knows she will be asked this every single time… It was less than a week ago she sat down with Andrea Mitchell and declined to say any of this. We can see the strategy changing in realtime and see what the investigations bring, if anything. I think she’s gone a long way toward turning the page, at least for now, on this.”
The distinction that Zeleny is making, between the “lawyerly answer” Hillary gave to Andrea Mitchell and what she told Muir, is a microscopic one, at best. If you let Hillary’s apology play a little longer, she qualifies her apology in almost exactly the same way she did to Mitchell:
“But I’m sorry that it has, you know, raised all of these questions. I do take responsibility for having made what is clearly not the best decision.”
That’s right, even though he’s still critical of Hillary for waiting so long, and even though there is almost no substantive difference between what Hillary said to Andrea Mitchell on Friday and what she told Muir, and even though Zeleny casts this apology as a purely political move, the magical qualities of the words “I’m sorry” are such that it works on him anyway!
Those angry Hillary supporters are right that no matter what Hillary Clinton does, the Morning Joes and Fox Newses of the world are going to continue to make noise about this issue, but it is the Jeff Zelenys and Andrea Mitchells and Chuck Todds of the world who set the narrative. What you just heard from Jeff Zeleny was the birth of a new narrative.
Is it stupid? You betcha, but that’s how the media works. Even as Zeleny was shifting his narrative on Hillary based on nothing, he offhandedly remarked that all of these investigations have, thus far, not amounted to anything, which somehow figures nowhere in the calculation, while the magical proximity of the words “I’m sorry” to the words “I made a mistake” is apparently everything.
If Zeleny’s narrative takes root, it will be a lucky thing for the Clinton campaign, because this definitely would have played better had she done it on Friday. As poorly-served as Hillary has been by the media, she’s been served even more poorly by the campaign that kept her from doing this until now, and which dopily leaked out their ten-point plan for authentically relating to fellow humans with humor and warmth right before Hillary hit Muir with some quality emoting.
The campaign made a lot of good moves in the early going, rolling out first-class policy ideas and resisting pressure to pander to white voters, but looking back on it now, those things feel more like Hillary’s ideas than the campaign’s. Going forward, Hillary Clinton would be wise to listen more to her own instincts than to those of the people who thought it would be a good idea to literally string the press along during a Fourth of July parade.
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
