Reality and politics

If one’s reality is disdain, then taking care “to be real” would mean making sure disdain showed through without mask or inhibition.

In Hillary Clinton’s case, taking care to be real in a press conference would mean saying something along this order: “In answering your question, I want to make clear that I have little to no respect for you or your supposed profession.

“Please know that I consider you provincial and petty and pitiable, and that your question, like most questions I get from people who hide in the bushes and watch and criticize rather than take risks to engage in the process directly, is self-serving and intellectually substandard. Your question is mostly about your desire for a byline on Page One, not anything meaningful to me or anyone else.” -

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The supposed big takeaway from a release of documents from the Clinton presidential library on Friday-documents mined instantly by the media in search of revelations about our likely next president-came from one of Bill and Hillary’s old political handlers, Mandy Grunwald.

In 1999 as Clinton prepared for a press availability with retiring New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan,whom she wanted to replace, and who didn’t much like her, Grunwald advised her in a memorandum not to appear defensive with reporters, but at ease. She counseled her not to recoil even from uncomfortable questions,but to appear to welcome them. She wanted Clinton to be more chatty and expansive than usual, to dare to answer more than the basic question, and to use humor.

In summary, Grunwald told Hillary: “Be careful to be real.”

Aha, proclaimed the commentary: Hillary has to be encouraged to try, presumably fraudulently, to be a real person.

Actually, though, Grunwald’s context was letting the press see more of the authentic private Hillary.

So here’s what’s real about Clinton: She thinks the media, generally speaking, expend energy wastefully pursuing matters inconsequential and silly, such as poring over presidential documents and dismissing the substantive ones to try to find something trivial to exploit like Grunwald’s memo.

But here is something else that’s real: There are gradations and nuances and complexities to all human essence-compartments within all our realities-and Hillary, I am assured, is possessed, in certain comfortable private social settings, of humor and generosity and gregariousness.

Similarly, some in the press-a few-actually might possess a redeeming compartment of their own.

Yet Clinton remains today-15 years after Grunwald’s memo-clumsily guarded in her public behavior, unwilling or unable to let the private side show, careful not to chance on-camera any off-camera reality.

She likes control. A comment made to a reporter is control ceded to the reporter.

Clinton comes by her aversion naturally, owing to the foundation of a controlling nature laced with disdain. But she is made more that way by famously exploited moments.

Once she said she could have stayed home and baked cookies instead of practicing law, thus inviting conflict-of-interest charges against her gubernatorial husband. That got her accused of disparaging stay-at-home moms.

Once she said her devotion to her husband wasn’t any Tammy Wynette stand-by-your-man thing, which got her accused of … I’m not sure. Disparaging the honky-tonk marital culture in Southern red states, perhaps.

As a longtime observer of both Clintons, Hillary and Bill, I offer this assessment of their relative public genuineness: They are both phony in public, or at least different from the way they often are in private.

But most everyone is.

He is better than she is at not being transparently phony, or transparently different from the way he is otherwise. Thus his public manner is actually less penetrable and less real. She offers real awkwardness that doesn’t much hide real disdain.

So Grunwald’s political advice was hardly the worthiest takeaway from Friday’s dump of documents.

Here was a worthier takeaway: Reforming health care in contemporary America is next to impossible politically, fraught with inescapable peril no matter how you proceed.

Hillary was Barack Obama’s forerunner on health-care reform.

She took the massive legislation unto herself in secret task-force meetings; he, seeing the error of that, delegated the composition of the measure to Congress, only to have Nancy Pelosi say we’d find out what was in it after we passed it.

Clinton received internal memoranda warning against overpromising with assurances that everyone would be able to keep their doctor or insurance policy. And her measure never even got voted on.

Obama went ahead and made those promises, and his proposal-the one he delegated to Congress-is now law … delayed law, troubled law and politically unpopular law, but law.

But here is surely the most meaningful takeaway from the document release Friday: There is nothing that has yet been uncovered that makes Hillary Clinton any less inevitably our next president.

She doesn’t like reporters. Next we may find out that she’s not crazy about snakes in general.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 03/04/2014

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