The person who gave a press conference Tuesday at the United Nations to explain the controversy over her emails will never be president of the United States.
That Hillary Clinton — who spoke before the press for the first time about the strange private email system she set up during her tenure as secretary of state — delivered what may have been the worst public performance by a major American politician since Texas Gov. Rick Perry spent 53 seconds during a Republican debate in 2011 trying to remember the name of a government agency before giving up and saying, “Oops.”
I don’t mean Hillary will never be president. I mean that Hillary will never be president.
Let me explain by analogy: Tom Hanks did a “Saturday Night Live” guest spot a few years ago and played “Dumb Tom Hanks” on “Celebrity Jeopardy,” getting himself trapped in a dry-cleaning bag. Hanks was himself, only stupid.
As she preps her 2016 run, Hillary Clinton shows every sign of having morphed into Dumb Hillary Clinton, and it’s only getting worse.
But remember that, like Tom Hanks, Hillary isn’t dumb. She’s only playing dumb.
The problem is that in playing dumb, she acts stupid.
I’m talking about the Hillary Clinton who makes unforced errors every time she opens her mouth — the one who last year described herself as having been “dead broke” in 2001 when she had $20 million in book advances coming her way. That moment of playing dumb was designed to make her seem more accessible to the hoi polloi she wanted to buy her new book.
I mean the Hillary Clinton who said, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” in 2013, when asked about security lapses under her watch on the night the Benghazi massacre took place. She said it because she was trying to make the point that Republicans were harping on a dead issue — but instead, she made herself seem indifferent to the deaths at Benghazi.
On Tuesday, she informed us that she used her own server for her own email because it was too difficult for her to have two iPhones — so she was playing Dumb Hillary Clinton,with her implicit argument that it’s easier to have your own server in your own house than to use a government device. Who believes that?
Mrs. Clinton informed us that she won’t make her emails public (save the 55,000 pages she “printed out” for the State Department) because they include communications between her and her husband. That was Dumb Hillary Clinton, who seems not to know her husband’s people told The Wall Street Journal only last week that he has sent exactly two emails in his lifetime.
The press corps covering the conference, and hundreds of reporters following it live on Twitter, seemed utterly agog at the falsity, the stonewalling and the flashes of anger that offered the only real indication she knows perfectly well how damaging all this might be for her.
Smart Hillary Clinton would know that people don’t delete their most personal emails: That’s the point of email, that it’s a wondrous passively organized file cabinet of your personal communications.
It’s the junk you delete, not the emails about your daughter’s wedding. Those are the kinds of things most people actually want to keep.
But not Dumb Hillary Clinton, who said she’d done just that.
Smart Hillary Clinton seems to have invented Dumb Hillary Clinton to protect her from herself. But Smart Hillary isn’t doing herself any favors.
Mrs. Clinton is going to have to transform herself, to get rid of Dumb Hillary and find a new persona to cope with troubled times, because the person who made so horrendous an accounting of herself yesterday has no future other than ignominious defeat.
Remember: Dumb Tom Hanks was in a skit. For five minutes.