GREAT MOMENTS IN HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM: ABC’s David Muir Ends Hillary Interview with Softballs on Running Again, ‘Your Mother’s Voice in Your Ear:’

In her third interview in the past week, Hillary Clinton sat down Tuesday with ABC’s World News Tonight anchor David Muir and while Muir pressed her on the e-mail scandal, Muir concluded part one of the discussion with gooey questions about if she ponders why she’s running for president “in your most private of moments” and whether she hears “your mother’s voice in your ear.”

Particularly given his employment at ABC, the House of Stephanopoulos, I was going to make the usual remarks about Muir being a Democrat operative with a byline. But given all of the articles over the years concerning Hillary’s robotic nature and rumors of her military-grade titanium exoskeleton, perhaps Muir was bravely performing an on-the-air Voight-Kampff test on Hillary by asking about her thoughts on her mother. He’s very lucky; here’s how those sorts of interviews can also end-up when they don’t go as well:

RELATED: “From 1995. Hillary’s quest for a ‘softer image’ has been going on for at least 20 years now.” And it was just four years later that Beltway journalists were similarly grousing about Al Gore’s robotic tone as well.

In a way, that’s not a coincidence, as Noemie Emery wrote in her January 2008 review of Sally Bedell Smith’s bio of Bill and Hillary’s White House years at the Weekly Standard:

With a keen sense of self-preservation, Bill Clinton picked his two most important political partners to help himself function, to compensate for his frailties, to atone for his sins. Intuitive, seductive, empathetic, and sometimes inspired, but wholly deficient in focus and discipline, he sought out partners with focus and discipline, and orderly, literal, minds. They served his needs, in that they helped him to function; but as he had his failings, they too had theirs.

With their rigor and discipline went a lack of intuition and nuance–the je ne sais quoi that makes a political talent, and that no amount of effort and diligence can ever supply. Bill loved campaigning; Gore found it a struggle, and his torment was obvious. Hillary is an unhappy warrior–at best, a grim one–and her description of the anticipated evisceration of Barack Obama as the “fun” part was a chilling moment that surprised no one who has looked into For Love of Politics.

Unlike Bill, Gore and Hillary have no sense of how they appear to others, and seldom fail to make the wrong gesture–Hillary’s cackle, the grating “caw” she unleashes in efforts at levity, is on a par with the sighs, eye-rolling, and other strange efforts at intimidation that helped Gore lose the election in the 2000 debates. With their conspicuous lack of political talents, neither Gore nor Hillary would ever have reached the top tier of candidates if they had not been elevated by being chosen by Clinton. But if they had been more graceful, and less pedantic and heavy-handed, they would not have been chosen, as they would not have supplied what Bill lacked.

It was a bargain that worked well for Bill, but ended in heartbreak for Gore, and may do the same thing for Hillary Clinton. This story is not over yet.

But unlike repeated viewings of Blade Runner on Blu-Ray, the reruns of The Hillary Show sure are getting increasingly dull to watch, aren’t they?

MORE: “Humanizing Hillary: The Impossible Dream.“ “As Robotics professor Masahiro Mori noticed in 1970, ‘almost-human’ is often considerably more alarming than is ‘noticeably different,'” Charles Cooke writes. “Why are Hillary’s laugh sequences so bone-jarringly awful? Because they’re nearly there.”