Are you ready for the half-hour Fox News/Hillary Clinton interview?

Finally, she and Hannity will get to hash out their differences face to face.

No no, kidding. It’s Greta Van Susteren and Bret Baier who’ll be interviewing her.

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“The joint half-hour interview will cover an array of topics, including Clinton’s forthcoming book,’ ‘Hard Choices,’ the upcoming 2016 presidential election and the 2012 attacks on Benghazi,” the release stated.

Clinton’s interview will air Tuesday, June 17, starting at approximately 6:45 p.m., straddling Baier’s show “Special Report” and Van Susteren’s show “On the Record.”

Coincidentally, Politico reported last night that Team Hillary has been huddling over how to manage its message on Benghazi, replete with participation in a listserv among Democrats devoted to the new select committee. Clintonworld mouthpiece Philippe Reines is set to brief Third Way, a group of centrist Dems, on Benghazi and other national security issues tomorrow. Quoth one attendee, “With national security issues taking up more oxygen right now — the president’s speech at West Point, the Benghazi hearings — there are a lot of Democrats who understand that this is our window to control the narrative.” Part of controlling that narrative, I take it, is sending Hillary herself into the lion’s den to face 10-15 minutes of questioning on Benghazi from Fox’s most respected hard-news anchor. Once she gets through it, she’s got an easy comeback when she’s pressed on the topic in the future: “Of course I have nothing to hide. Would I have gone on Fox News to take the heat if I did?” It’s a way to put Benghazi behind her, sort of.

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Three questions, though. One: Why do this before the select committee has held its hearings? If she says something to Bret and Greta that ends up being contradicted by the evidence produced by Trey Gowdy and company, she’s in trouble. She’d better be awfully well prepared. Two: Is she doing exclusives with other news outlets to push her new book? I assume there’s an interview coming at MSNBC, if only to signal to lefties that she’s interested in their concerns too. Her problem is that there are no big-name hard-news people a la Van Susteren and Baier left at that network. All the usual suspects — Maddow, Hayes, Matthews — are loud-and-proud ideologues who might give her a harder time from the left than she’s bargaining for. She’d probably be okay (or more than okay) with Lawrence O’Donnell. Or what about Ronan Farrow? He used to work for Hillary at the State Department, as he’ll happily remind you ad nauseam. He’s not going to throw her any curveballs and I’m sure he’d be thrilled with the publicity for his show.

Three: Why didn’t she choose Megyn Kelly for the Fox interview instead? It would have been super-splashy to have the network’s big new star, arguably the most influential woman in TV news right now, sit down with the would-be first woman president. Kelly wouldn’t have gone easy on her but Greta and Bret won’t either, in which case, why not opt for maximum star power? Signaling sisterhood will, after all, be key to Hillary’s 2016 strategy:

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It’s a given in politics today that men will vote more Republican, while women will vote more Democratic. That has consistently been the case for a long, long time. But with Clinton at the top of the ticket, that pronounced split could turn into a chasm.

The Post poll shows that women say they would support Clinton by a striking 61-33 percent. Men, though, say they would back her by a far smaller count of 49-46 percent — within the margin of error. That’s a 25-point gap between Clinton’s margin among women and among men…

What’s perhaps most striking among the new numbers is that the difference lies almost completely among white voters. Non-white men and women are pretty similar when it comes to the former secretary of state, but while 58 percent of white women back Clinton, 54 percent of white men oppose her.

“Gender gap” is actually the wrong way to frame those numbers, since it might be taken to mean that men and women are splitting in roughly equal numbers in opposite directions. Not so. Hillary’s competitive among men, albeit a few points behind, and enjoying an unholy landslide among women. Something dramatic had better happen in the next two years to change that or else all the Benghazi rhetoric in the would isn’t going to stop this train.

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While you mull that, via the Free Beacon, here’s what she has to look forward to from her inevitable MSNBC interview.

Update: Hmmmm.

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John Sexton 3:20 PM | December 23, 2024
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