Hillary Clinton’s campaign took a beating among some pundits this week for telling the truth: She’s going to employ a strategy focused on a narrow set of the most competitive states.
In other words, she’s running as a modern presidential candidate.
Mrs. Clinton’s statement is what’s called a Kinsley gaffe — taking its name from Michael Kinsley, a journalist who said a gaffe is something true that a politician isn’t supposed to say. By conceding the obvious, she revealed the disjunction between the politics we say we want and the kind we actually have.