Fourth Estate Hillary Wins Again It’ll take more than these emails to knock Clinton out.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Mindful of all things Hillary Clinton as we are, shall we take the occasion of her latest email dump to recalibrate the mental instruments we use to measure fatal political damage?

The nation’s newsrooms—overflowing as they do with reporters chasing newsworthy revelations that will usher politicians to their permanent reward—might be a good place to begin the fine-tuning. In recent years, the press has broken stories and aired scandals that have helped to drive out of office or off the campaign trail such politicians as John Walsh, Herman Cain, Anthony Weiner, Aaron Schock, John Kitzhaber, Kwame Kilpatrick, Mark Foley and others. But as long as a politician retains the support of his party, avoids provable financial crimes and makes sure his sexual adventures aren’t abusive or too quirky, no brigade of journalists bearing witness can expel him from public life for very long.


Just four months ago, when news broke that Clinton had used a personal email account in her duties as Secretary of State even the left-bending Guardian was treating the news as if it might be career-ending because it may have violated laws and made classified information vulnerable to prying eyes. “The most toxic fallout from the disclosure may turn out to be the political ammunition that it has handed Clinton’s enemies in the Republican party ahead of her likely 2016 presidential run,” the Guardian reported. Even the less-opinionated press exhibited similar symptoms of frenzy. "Issue of Voter Trust Revisits Hillary Clinton With Email Controversy," headlined the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post went with "Top Biden Backer: Hillary Clinton Will ‘Die By 1,000 Cuts’ on E-Mail Story" and McClatchy put it, "A Clinton Candidacy Is Weakened By String Of Revelations." The next month, Rand Paul was telling ABC News that when the ultimate Clinton revelations were finally revealed, they would "shock people" and "make people question whether or not she should be president or not.”

Instead, time, Clinton’s stamina and the modern laws of media have turned the potential "political ammunition" into duds. Those of us paying attention to last night’s crop of emails are mostly giggling about what they say about Clinton’s low fax-machine proficiency, Colin Powell’s "joke" and John Podesta’s retelling, Clinton’s reference to Santa and her worries that she’s being cut out of cabinet meetings. There may be yet-to-be-identified damaging news in the news emails, or information that will lead to seriously detrimental findings, but as Bill and Hillary Clinton have proved many times, if a politician can ignore the noise and the shame coming out of press reports, and digs his or her heels in, the official can survive almost any indiscretion that doesn’t come paired with an indictment.

Some journalists believe that the Clintons are space aliens who possess powers that allow them to defy the political laws of physics. But other politicians have battled bad, bad press about their conduct and prevailed. In 2007, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) survived news accounts about his past use of a Washington escort service by humbling up. "Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and from my wife in confession and marriage counseling," Vitter said. Just this spring, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), who heads the House Transportation Committee, defused (at least for now) a story about his "private and personal" relationship with an airline lobbyist by admitting it and saying "that is all I will say about that."

Why didn’t Anthony Weiner defeat his bad news by adopting the Vitter strategy? For one thing, forgiveness appeals tend to find more receptive ears when the indiscretion is in the past, and Weiner shoved it back into the present by continuing to expose himself. Shamed adulterer South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who didn’t resign, showed that political comebacks are within reach of any politician who invokes God frequently, asks for forgiveness, mends political fences and times his reentry into politics smartly—things that Eliot Spitzer didn’t do.

But enough about wild passions that burn hot in the furnace of transgression, and back to Clinton who, as we speak, is sneaking out of the press corps’ gunsights. Like Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton knows that annoying as it is, scandal-flavored news stories rarely cause an established politician permanent harm if they can batten down and wait out the storm. As I noted last month with a link to an AEI infographic, if Clinton patiently endures her falls from public popularity she’s almost always rewarded with a rise. Journalists, who are paid to remember, forget the general public’s difficulty in recalling anything that happened longer than a week ago or that can’t be explained in a paragraph. You couldn’t explain Sidney Blumenthal in 27-volume encyclopedia.

The scheduled release of the remaining emails—at month’s end for the next seven months—will work to Clinton’s advantage. Less water torture than intermittent showers, they may well continue to work to her advantage as they rill their way down from Foggy Bottom into scandal-loving newsrooms. Presently, the voters are yawning at their less than shocking contents, and in coming months the Clinton forces might end up thanking the Republicans for requesting the emails because they’ve done more to put a shine than a tarnish on her. Say whatever you will about Hillary Clinton, she never panics.

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Rills of email cascaded down my face, pulling with them tears of helplessness. Cry your heart out with email to [email protected] . My email alerts never cry. My Twitter feed loves a good laugh. And my RSS feed betrays no emotion at all.