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Two years after Hillary Clinton left her post as secretary of state, our partner The New York Times discovered her peculiar email set-up at the State Department.
Rather than using a state.gov email address for her business dealings, she relied exclusively on a private email account housed on her own personal server.
Clinton opponents have questioned whether she compromised national security—or tried to hide questionable dealings. And they've demanded answers and apologies.
But while Clinton has offered plenty of the former, she's been less forthright with the latter. Among her statements: "I certainly wish I had made a different choice" and "I regret that this has become such a cause celebre."
In short: A lot of almost apologies, but not quite all-the-way apologies.
Finally, on Tuesday, after months of questioning by the public and the news media, Clinton uttered the big words during an interview with David Muir of ABC News:
"I should have used two accounts, one for personal, one for work related emails. That was a mistake. I'm sorry about that. I take responsibility and i'm trying to be as transparent as I can," she said.
This apology could have been made months ago. Why wasn't it? And why do politicians so often refuse to apologize, or apologize so horribly?
Here to weigh in is Edwin Battistella, the author of "Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology."
EXCERPT FROM "SORRY ABOUT THAT: THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC APOLOGY," COURTESY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:
Shakedown
Each day from late April to mid-July 2010, thousands of barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon explosion. On June 16, after meeting with British Petroleum (BP) officials in the White House, President Barack Obama announced an agreement that many saw as a step toward accountability. The company would establish an independently run compensation fund of twenty billion dollars for the victims of the oil spill. Representative Joe Barton was not pleased. Barton was a former oil company consultant and Republican congressman representing Arlington, Texas. And he was the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. As that committee prepared to hear from BP chief Tony Hayward, Barton offered this opening statement:
I apologize. I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yester- day. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown—in this case a $20 billion shakedown.
Democrats and Republicans condemned Barton’s remarks. The House Republican leadership ordered Barton to apologize. He did later that day, saying that he thought BP should be held responsible, and “if anything I have said this morning has been misconstrued in opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstruction.” A later statement apologized explicitly, without the conditional “if ”:
I apologize for using the term “shakedown” with regard to yesterday’s actions at the White House in my opening statement this morning, and I retract my apology to BP. I regret the impact that my statement this morning implied that BP should not pay for the consequences of their decisions and actions in this incident.
The irony, of course, is that Barton’s first apology—to BP—reflected his true sentiments. (It was also infelicitous, since Barton was not in a position to apologize for the Obama administration or the United States.) His second set of apologies failed in a different way. They were forced and vague, regretting a “misconstruction” and the implication of the earlier apology. In the morning session, Barton’s call to apologize came from anger within him. Later in the day a different sort of call to apologize came from Barton’s leadership, resulting in an instrumental, but much less sincere, apology.