AP Photo Fourth Estate Being a Clinton Apologist is a Hard Life

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer.

From the outside at least, being a friend of the Clintons looks like a demeaning occupation. You defend them, you defend them some more, you lie down in front of tanks for them and then—when you least suspect it—they reverse gear and betray you.

Hillary Clinton did that to her most ardent supporters yesterday. After six months of indignant responses, classic stonewalling, legalistic prevarication, dismissive jokes and a sustained and coordinated counter-attack by her allies, she finally capitulated to critics yesterday, telling David Muir of ABC News that running a personal email account and server during her tenure as Secretary of State was a “mistake” and that she was “sorry about that.” Compare this, if you will, to Bill Clinton’s denial of an affair with Monica Lewinsky that caused scores of his supporters to prop up his lies until he ultimately folded.


Hillary’s regret came exactly one day after she told the Associated Press she had no reason to apologize, downplaying the email controversy as a “distraction.”

She also used the ABC News interview to apologize for previous, inadequate attempts to explain her conduct. “I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that,” she said. But even in this minor act of self-criticism, Clinton reflexively added the qualifying word of “perhaps” to pave an escape route should she need to abandon the apology six months from now. “I take responsibility,” she added, which is politician-speak for, “Now, will you leave me alone?”

You can decide for yourself how sincere these devious and dissembling comments by Clinton are. What interests me is how dramatically this turnaround ditches the surrogates who rushed to the airwaves and to defend her conduct. In early March, when the story broke, Clinton defenders (and intimates) David Brock, Lanny Davis, Maria Cardona, Jennifer Granholm, James Carville and Karen Finney advanced with absolute certainty that the Clinton email/server story was, in Granholm’s words, “just a nothingburger.” Brock’s pro-Clinton advocacy organization Correct the Record called the email affair a “manufactured controversy” and a “tempest in a teapot.” Carville called the email dispute “made up” and Clinton a victim of a double standard (“Colin Powell does the same thing. Jeb Bush does the same thing.”). About the emails, Davis said, “All preserved. And if deleted you know they can be found.” Cardona had so much faith in Clinton that she said, “I don’t think she needs to say anything more until she actually announces her campaign.”

Clinton has now conceded on national TV that the email story is not quite a nothing burger. It’s actually a Royale With Cheese—maybe a Double Royale With Cheese and Pineapple. Nothing was “manufactured” and indeed, yes, some of the emails were deleted. In recognition of these facts, will these Hillary loyalists volunteer to return to the TV chat shows to acknowledge their errors? Better yet, will the shows revisit the issue to illustrate how Clinton’s proxies attempted to roll them? Nah, but it would make great TV, wouldn’t it?

Did the surrogates even know what they were talking about? According to a Washington Post story from the opening week of the “scandal,” some “supporters in Congress and others were willing to go on cable television to defend Clinton” were dismayed by the fact that her aides did not prepare talking points to help them help her. “A lot of people were flying blind,” one anonymous Democratic ally told the Post. As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf noted in a splendid follow-up to the Post account, two levels of political sleaze were revealed: First, the Clinton defenders sought talking points—rather than the truth—about the emails for use in their rebuttals; and second, when given none, some winged it on pure faith in their patrona.

Clinton isn’t the first candidate to reward the blindly loyal with a kick to the teeth. Even at the semi-pro levels, politics demands the occasional human sacrifice to that the higher ups can go even higher up. But the suicide missions completed by people like David Brock, Lanny Davis, et al. are almost never life- or career-ending. For psychological reasons I cannot plumb here, they seem not to mind being used. To them, giving an uneducated defense of someone you love is the highest form of friendship. Like video-game deaths, the death that comes from shame is only temporary. Besides, the TV press doesn’t discriminate against sources who talk out of their hat. What would cable news be if it couldn’t book guests who dissembled, stonewalled and cast false aspersions? Today, every one of the friends and party hacks who rose—armed with only the flimsiest understanding of the underlying facts and driven by the basest impulses—to champion the email hygiene of Hillary Clinton remain welcome across the dial to spout more slipshod and ill-informed opinions.

Why is that? If Clinton is so “sorry” about her “mistake,” if she really thinks she “could have and should have done a better job answering questions earlier,” why shouldn’t we hold her supporters to the same standard? So I invite Lawrence O’Donnell, Erin Burnett, Christi Paul, and others who hosted the Clinton apologists to invite their guests back on ask if they regret about endorsing Clinton’s mistake comes close to equaling hers.

Like Clinton, I’ll bet they’d say they’re sorry, too. But like Clinton, I’ll bet they won’t mean it.

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I once said I was sorry, but I didn’t like how it felt. Apologize to me via email to [email protected]. My email alerts have been called sociopathic. My Twitter feed has been banned in several southern states as psychotic. My RSS feed is used to educate children in one-room schoolhouses.