How to Solve the Hillary Clinton Press Conference 'Problem'
"Because fck you, that's why."
This is not an answer that an ambitious pol should give to the question of why said pol has not had a formal press conference in 263 days, but I guarantee you that it's the answer most of the pols I've ever met wanted to give. The endless calls for Hillary Rodham Clinton to submit to unscripted questions long ago moved from journalistic curiosity to journalistic entitlement.
No, kids, she doesn't have to hold a press conference. In fact, as regards some sort of duty to democracy, she has less obligations to answer your questions than she has to answer the questions of a terrified Iowa farmer or the mother of an opiate addict in New Hampshire. As a member of the craft, I think it would be best for all concerned if she did but, at this point, the whining is setting off the alarms at NORAD and any press conference she held would result in a general square-dance of self-congratulation in every Green Room inside and outside the Beltway.
Thanks to Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post, reliable dispenser of the most conventional of conventional wisdom, we learn that the subject came up on Wednesday morning's edition of Squint and the Meat Puppet in the form of a question from Nicolle Wallace, one of those former employees of the Avignon Presidency who has been washed in the light of the cathode ray, so now she gets to ask the following, without apparent irony or self-awareness of any kind, despite having once worked for the most truthless administration in history:
WALLACE: Isn't the antidote to this to sit her down today in front of your traveling press corps people like Andrea Mitchell, who certainly can appreciate the contributions of people like Melinda Gates and-and others, and let her take questions until there are no more questions to be answered?
MOOK: Well, first of all, Hillary's done over 300 interviews this year alone.
WALLACE: I'm not-I didn't talk about-and I know the difference between a three minute ground-ruled interview and a press conference because I-I've put on a couple of each. But why wouldn't you have her do a press conference today just to-you-you have a perception problem on the question of honesty and trustworthiness, why wouldn't you put her out there to your traveling press corps who knows all the intricacies of sort of the defense you laid out, which is-which is legitimate? But this is about the perception.
MOOK: (in his head) Because fck you, that's why.
I made up that last part.
Leaving aside the fact that, like anyone else in that bubonic plague of a presidency, Nicolle Wallace has not cleaned enough bedpans at Walter Reed to be allowed back in polite politics, the idea that one press conference (or two, or 105) would put the carefully crafted "perception" to rest is laughable. (It is the idiot cousin of the argument that, had Bill Clinton copped to his affair, he wouldn't have been impeached.) It is belied not only by the experience of her own husband's presidency, but also by a nearly forgotten episode during her time as First Lady.
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It was called the "Pink Suit Press Conference." It was a 70-minute performance piece in which HRC answered questions about the phony cattle-futures scandal and the phony Whitewater scandal. (You can watch a piece of it here, if you have no life of any kind.) This took place in 1994. Subsequent to that, there was a summer of endless, baffling hearings in the House and the Senate in which 29 Clinton administration officials testified and nobody was charged with any wrongdoing. (This was during the period in which Al D'Amato was a United States Senator and nobody was embarrassed by that fact.)
That August, Ken Starr replaced Robert Fiske as the special prosecutor. And everything, of course, went downhill from there. So I think that we can safely say that the Pink Suit Press Conference did not put all the questions to rest, and that anyone who thinks that another press conference on the trail in 2016 would eliminate the "perception" that exists out there is either a charlatan or a fool.
(Also, I am inexcusably tardy in pointing out that Tiger Beat On The Potomac ran a piece in 2015 about HRC's previous press conference and hired to write it Jeff Gerth, the guy whose botched report on Whitewater started the whole business. Well played.)
There always will be "more questions." There will always be another document, another source, another e-mail. The smoking gun always will be tantalizingly jusssssst a bit out of reach. That's the way The Clinton Rules work. It seems like now the demands for her to hold a press conference have become the worst kind of political correctness-PC on the PC's, you can call it.
I think she should do one. I am not so full of myself as to think she owes me one.
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