| 1 | Hillary Clinton held a press availability in Las Vegas Tuesday afternoon. |
| 2 | It did not go well. |
| 3 | Clinton got into an extended back and forth with Fox News Channel's Ed Henry over the private email server she exclusively used during her time as Secretary of State. |
| 4 | Oomph. |
| 5 | Clinton, who seems to have a blind spot as to why the e-mail server story is such a big deal, made a bunch of mistakes in that brief interaction with the media that you would assume someone of her deep experience would have been able to avoid. |
| 6 | Here's a list of what she did wrong. |
| 7 | She sounds like a lawyer. |
| 8 | Her first response is, as it was when she first addressed the existence of the private server back in March, to insist that she is in no legal jeopardy. |
| 9 | "What I did was legally permitted, number one, first and foremost, okay?" |
| 10 | Clinton said. |
| 11 | Sure. No neutral observer has suggested that there is any illegality in what Clinton did. |
| 12 | But there's a big difference between how this story plays in a court of law and how it plays in the court of public opinion. |
| 13 | Clinton seems not to grasp that simply because she is not being charged with anything doesn't mean that this whole set-up doesn't look bad and raise doubts about her among voters. |
| 14 | Talking in legal terms does not help Clinton's political case on this. |
| 15 | She casts the whole thing as normal and everyday. |
| 16 | I don't doubt that there are regular disagreements between the State Department and the intelligence community's inspector general about who gets to look at what. |
| 17 | And we know that other secretaries of state have used private e-mail addresses. |
| 18 | She's dismissive. |
| 19 | Yes, Ed is interrupting her. |
| 20 | Yes, he is close to antagonistic. |
| 21 | But no, he isn't doing anything that Clinton hasn't see a billion times before. |
| 22 | From the start, she is quite clearly annoyed with the line of questioning and is unable to mask that fact. |
| 23 | (All politicians get annoyed with reporters' questions; good ones find ways not to show it.) |
| 24 | Clinton does not believe this should be a story or that she should have to keep answering questions about it. |
| 25 | But that's not her decision to make. |
| 26 | Politics is about dealing with the world as it is, not as you want it to be. |
| 27 | So no, Clinton doesn't have to like that she's being subjected to more questions about her e-mail practices. |
| 28 | But she does have to do a better job at not showing just how beneath contempt she believes the issue to be. |
| 29 | She's sarcastic. |
| 30 | Under the best possible reading, Clinton's response to whether she "wiped" the server - "like with a cloth or something?" |
| 31 | - is evidence of a lack of technological know-how. |
| 32 | Which is fine. |
| 33 | But it's hard for me to believe that, amid tons and tons of questions about what was/is on the server and whether the server was purposely erased over the last many months, Clinton is entirely unaware of what the term "wipe" means in this context. |
| 34 | And if she does know, then her "with a cloth or something?" line is just terrible politics. |
| 35 | People generally dislike sarcasm from their politicians; that's especially true when that sarcasm is tied to an issue that many people view as a very serious one. |
| 36 | She's wrong. |
| 37 | As Clinton is leaving the news conference, a reporter asks whether she is worried that the e-mail issue will continue to linger. |
| 38 | Clinton responds: "Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys." |
| 39 | While I can't fact-check what people talk to Clinton about every second of every day, there is new polling data that suggest that her handling of her e-mail server is of concern to a significant number of voters. |
| 40 | Fifty-six percent of those polled in a new CNN/ORC survey said that Clinton did something wrong by using a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state. |
| 41 | Slightly more than six in 10 Democrats (63 percent) believe Clinton did nothing wrong - that's down from 71 percent in March - while slightly more than one in three independents (37 percent) say the same. |
| 42 | So this isn't just a media creation. |