

Hillary Clinton (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

The new Post poll that came out today gives Hillary Clinton lots of reasons for optimism. Yes, her favorability rating has dropped, but that’s an almost inevitable consequence of her becoming a nearly-official candidate (it’s always been the case that Clinton’s approval has gone up and down as a function of her distance from partisan politics). More importantly, she maintains double-digit leads over all her potential GOP challengers, beating Jeb Bush by 14 points, Scott Walker by 17, Marco Rubio by 17, and Ted Cruz by 21.

Which helps explain an interesting disagreement she’s having with Trey Gowdy, the chair of the Benghazi select committee, over her testimony about her State Department emails. On this particular quasi-scandal — and whatever others like it that may emerge over the course of the presidential campaign — Clinton may well have decided she’ll emerge mostly unscathed.

As we learned on Tuesday, Gowdy has asked her to testify on the email issue in private, while she has told him that she’s willing to do so in a public hearing, with cameras and all. That would seem like the opposite of what you’d expect — wouldn’t Clinton want to avoid a big public spectacle where she has to answer all kinds of biting and uncomfortable questions from Republicans, and isn’t that exactly what Republicans would want?

Kevin Drum had one explanation for why Gowdy might prefer a private interview:

Go ahead and call me paranoid, but this sure seems like the perfect setup to allow Gowdy — or someone on his staff — to leak just a few bits and pieces of Clinton’s testimony that put her in the worst possible light. Darrell Issa did this so commonly that it was practically part of the rules of the game when he was investigating Benghazi and other Republican obsessions.” Which might be true, but that would still leave the question of why Clinton would want to do it in public.

The answer, I think, is that she’s come to the conclusion that these kind of mini-scandals are unlikely to matter much. That’s partly because, after over two decades in the national spotlight, voters’ opinions about her aren’t going to change all that much. But it’s also because the sight of a supposedly blockbuster hearing about alleged Clinton misdeeds has become so familiar that it’s unlikely to elicit much more than yawns.

An ordinary politician would be terrified of having to deal with a controversy that has the word “scandal” attached to it and getting hauled before a hostile committee like some kind of criminal on trial. The dramatic hearing would be terrible publicity, whether they were guilty or not; voters would be likely to assume that where there’s smoke there must be at least some amount of fire. But that rule may not apply to Hillary Clinton.

We’ve watched that carousel spin with the Clintons so many times that when people see it come around again, instead of viewing it through the narrative of “Politician under fire for misdeeds,” they view it through an equally familiar narrative, “which goes like this: “Clinton under fire from Republicans over trumped up baloney.”

It isn’t that voters are incapable of looking at the facts of a particular controversy and judging whether the charges have merit or not. Rather, it’s that, in the case of Clinton, they don’t default to the assumption that she must have done something wrong (except, of course, those who would never vote for her anyway).

All the years of Republican scandal-mongering may have served to give Hillary Clinton something few other politicians enjoy: the presumption of innocence. A new set of charges may get Republicans hopeful and the media excited, but unless there’s something truly atrocious revealed, she won’t sustain much political damage.

So she may not have much to fear from a public hearing on the emails (assuming that she thinks she’s on firm ground and has a good answer to every possible question). It would dominate the news for a couple of days, and at the end of it, voters would likely conclude that there wasn’t much there. Then the next time a new controversy emerges, people would just say, “Here we go again,” and assume it’s meaningless.

I’m sure the idea that Hillary Clinton might enjoy immunity from low-level political scandal because she’s been involved in so many previous scandals (real and fake) just drives Republicans batty. But if I’m right, they have no one to blame but themselves.