I’d say that Mike Barnicle’s comments on Morning Joe today need some context, but Mika Brzezinski provides it with a lengthy intro. The lead-in is lengthy, but the payoff is, well, amusing in an offhand sort of way. The story under discussion is worth a longer look, however (via Free Beacon):

If Barnicle seems contemptuous of this line of thinking, he’s got good reason. Mark Leibovich has an extensive profile into Hillary Clinton v23.0 for New York Times Magazine, which leans a bit heavy on pathos and victimhood while noting her several previous and unsuccessful reinventions. It paints her, at least in his first framing passage, as something of a passive flotsam in political wars without bothering to note that Hillary often put herself in the middle of them — and that she’s been a politician in her own right long enough to be fair game:

Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experi­ences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small. Moose tales aside, this does not come easily. She has resided at the center of so many scandals, psychodramas and culture wars that it’s hard to even keep track of them all, let alone know what the person within that bubble of attention is actually like. …

Still, all those introductions and forays into hostile territories have left her with battle scars. She is wary to a point where the control-freak tendencies of her campaign, especially with regard to how she is portrayed in the press, have reinforced an established story line: that she is sealed off and inaccessible and not like the rest of us. ‘‘DO YOU HAVE A PERCEPTION PROBLEM?’’ a reporter shouted out at her during Clinton’s last visit to New Hampshire, not quite the icebreaker you’d wish for when making reintroductions. As a rule, the media is not Clinton’s preferred confidant. Her campaign at first declined to make her available for an interview. It did offer me an ‘‘off the record’’ meeting, which is highly irregular: an off-the-record sit-down with a profile subject who happens to be running for president, and who is not exactly new to these rodeos. (I demurred on the off-the-record sit-down, at least at first.)

First, an off-the-record chat with a presidential candidate should be very unusual. It sounds more like a job interview. It’s one thing to be doing an interview and ask to discuss a particular question off-the-record, although even would be strange coming from a presidential candidate. Why would someone running for the nation’s top job need to talk to a reporter entirely off the record? Why would a reporter agree to it? That sounds like a negotiation or a surreptitious attempt to pass along talking points, although give Leibovich kudos for disclosing it.

Note the very passive tone Leibovich uses for Hillary in the first excerpted paragraph, the one Mika used when introducing the topic to Barnicle. What other two-term Senator and former Secretary of State would get described as “being inspected like an exotic species,” as if probing her record in office is something exotic? (Perhaps it is for the New York Times when it comes to Democrats.) She did not “reside” at the center of scandals; she was an active participant in many of them, including HillaryCare, the Travel Office firings, and especially the collapse of her Libya and Arab Spring policies and the sacking of our Benghazi consulate.

As for not knowing what the person inside is like, that’s a matter of choice — Hillary’s. Perhaps it might be resolved by interacting with the media more and answering questions about her tenure at State, rather than insisting on “off the record meetings” with reporters. Instead, it seems that Leibovich wants to paint Hillary as flotsam in the sea of life, just a poor unassuming woman who somehow managed to turn her connection to power into a nine-figure fortune.

Small wonder Barnicle was contemptuous of this new narrative. Shouldn’t all of us be?

My Freudian Slip Is Showing update: I wrote “patheos” instead of “pathos.” I’ve obviously been addicted to the great website Patheos for too long, eh?