If Clinton is your first choice, fine. If you really believe she exhibits those characteristics more and better than the others, have at it. But saying she’s the ONLY candidate who has them is obviously untrue and undermines your credibility.

Also, recalling the same kind of “It’s him and him ONLY” enthusiasm from some people for Howard Dean four years ago, I urge you to select a fallback choice. Early front runners don’t always get the nomination.

Even older, experienced campaign staffers and volunteers, in their enthusiasm and desire to help the candidate win, can say or do something that in a quieter, less-competitive environment they would never say or do.

Planting questioners in an opponent’s audience to ask especially hard or embarrassing questions is a tactic as old as our democracy. Planting friendly questions is not unheard of either. President Bush not only had them in his campaigns, his people brought them into the White House press room. Remember Jeff Gannon/Guckert?

Hillary Clinton is nothing if not extremely smart and well informed on a broad range of issues. She doesn’t need planted questions to be able to do well. Given the potential for embarrassing publicity, I’m sure if she had known about this nonsense in advance, she would have put a stop to it.

What I get from your post is that you don’t much like Clinton and so are prepared to see the worst in any incident such as this one. She’s not my first choice for president, but I credit her with being well qualified and formidable campaigner. I also expect Clinton made the decision for her spokesperson to fess up and admit this mistake, which was exactly the right thing to do.