Tim Kaine kept returning to one telling word Sunday. Hillary Clinton’s running mate appeared on ABC News’s This Week and was on-message responding to Friday’s news that FBI director James Comey is looking at a new source of emails in Clinton’s home-brew server scandal. “This is an unprecedented move,” Kaine told George Stephanopoulos, “because it happens close to an election, which is in violation of normal Justice Department protocol.” Not just that but “it involves talking about an ongoing investigation, which also violates the protocol.”
Protocol, protocol, protocol: Kaine was all about protocol. The FBI director owed the American public “full information” because he “violated these two protocols.” The most fundamental issue, the vice presidential candidate said, is whether Comey is “following established protocols for a law enforcement investigation.” And just in case it wasn’t clear enough, Kaine said “Following established protocols and rules is what you would expect from a chief law enforcement official.”
Kaine leaned on the protocol crutch more than half-a-dozen times in just that one interview. And all this protocol talk is telling. It recalls the essential scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities when detectives show up at Sherman McCoy’s home as part of their scattershot search for a hit-and-run Mercedes. They ask to see Sherman’s car, explaining it’s just “routine.” Desperate, McCoy seizes on the word: “I know, but, uh, if this, uh, is a routine, then I guess I ought to…follow the routine,” Sherman says. Flailing about for a reason not to show them the car, he says “I know, but if there’s a routine—then that’s what I should do too, follow a routine.”
As Wolfe writes, “Sherman was acutely aware of sputtering nonsense, but he hung on to this word routine for dear life.” He keeps sputtering, and keeps saying “routine,” and from the little smile on the investigator’s face, McCoy realizes that all his routine-talk has made him the prime suspect. And so he desperately switches gears, “I’m worried about the procedure,” Sherman says. And then flailing: “Procedure…routine…I’m not familiar with the terminology.”
If McCoy had dangled even longer, he might well have started asking about the proper protocol.
One can take away whatever one wants from the Clinton campaign’s procedural talking point. But one thing that is obvious with all this protocol talk is that someone—in the words of the Bonfire detective as he leaves McCoy’s apartment—is “in a hell of a mess.”
