In Clintonland, when they’re in besieged mode as they so often are, they tend to think, from Bill and Hillary on down, about how their reactions will look to their enemies, and whether their responses hand their attackers and the media any fodder. But they ought to think once in a while about how their responses to look to their supporters. You won’t be surprised to hear that I know many of them. A few are with her 100 percent down the line and give no quarter and admit no error. But most think she showed terrible judgment here. In refusing to use a state.gov email address for official business, she let her distrust of her political attackers (Judicial Watch and so on) take precedence over her basic commitment to the public she was serving. And she owes them—us, since this group includes me—an explanation.

“I’m sorry, I made a mistake, it won’t happen again” isn’t enough. Think about when someone in your life lets you down. Those few perfunctory words don’t fix things. For real reassurance, you need to know why it won’t happen again—what they learned. As I wrote the other day, she should speak with specificity about all this. Joan Walsh of The Nation, another defender, thinks so, too.

And Clinton should spell out—again, with real specificity—what steps she’d take as president to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen and to show she would run a clean administration more generally. As I’ve written before, this needs to include a specific explanation about what the Clintons plan to do about the Foundation if they return to the White House. He can’t be running that thing out of the White House, can he? At least not in the way he has been.