Hillary Clinton is a person, her campaign insists. Someone who has feelings and is not an evil Shakespearean character plotting and scheming in the background.
In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, senior Clinton aide Neera Tanden defended Clinton as a person who was not “looking at things in some crazy Lady Macbeth way.”
She urged voters and reporters to put her email decision in context, arguing that “no person was perfect.” Clinton was human, she insisted.
“Like, she’s a person. She’s a normal person,” Tanden insisted. “She laughs. She cries.”
When challenged by Thrush, Tanden admitted Mrs. Clinton wasn’t exactly “normal” but complained that reporters were too suspicious about her deleted emails.
“It’s a ubiquitous thing in the coverage that she’s got some grand Lady Macbeth strategy of how to do something and really it’s just like it happened and sometimes it was like a mistake or something, and like this, you know no one was sending any crazy message,” she said.
She complained that reporters harbored a “layer of suspicion to everything” about Clinton, when actually the former Secretary of State was more focused on policies.
Thrush argued that more off the record appearances with reporters would help fix the way they perceived the Democratic nominee.
Tanden criticized Clinton’s vanquished presidential primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders for damaging her character ratings.
“He did do significant damage to Hillary’s negatives,” she said. “I mean, he drove a lot of those negatives, and the truth of it, I mean, just to be candid — or honest about it, I think getting those kinds of attacks from another Democrat or another liberal or another progressive is much tougher for Hillary.”
Tanden admitted that it was difficult to recover from Sanders and his campaign attacks — pointing out that she was too close to Wall Street and being “bought and paid” by the big banks and corporations.
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