ANALYSIS: Tale of Two Tarmacs Shows Promise and Peril of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

— -- In a whirlwind of a week, two tarmacs on opposite sides of the country told tales of the promise and the peril of Hillary Clinton and her candidacy.

Eight days ago, former President Bill Clinton sought out Attorney General Loretta Lynch when he found out they were both at the Phoenix airport. They chatted amiably for roughly half an hour, even though FBI agents — who technically work for Lynch’s Justice Department — would be interviewing his wife about their email investigation just a few days later.

Fast-forward to Tuesday morning. In Washington, as Air Force One sat a few miles away to take her to a campaign event alongside President Barack Obama, the director of the FBI, James Comey, issued a point-by-point repudiation of Hillary Clinton and her handling of emails during her time at the State Department.

Clinton’s long-held public assertions — that she never sent or received classified information, that she turned over all work-related emails, that she never jeopardized national security with a private email account — were dismantled by Comey.

Yet there will be no criminal charges against Clinton, if the FBI’s recommendation is followed by the Obama Justice Department. And by early afternoon, Clinton boarded the famous airplane with the giant presidential seals so that two former rivals could work now as teammates to defeat Donald Trump.

If the system isn’t rigged, surely there were better ways to show it than for the FBI’s recommendation to come out on the day the president made his campaign debut for the candidate he wants to replace him. If the fix isn’t in, there also must have been a better time and place for Bill Clinton to catch up with the attorney general.

But so it is with Hillary Clinton and the Clintons more broadly. They cannot escape perceptions that they are skirting rules and parsing language to avoid accountability — often because of their own actions, however well intended.

The email controversy became a classic Clinton scandal in part because of the way she handled it. Her answers and even her initial apology came in fits and starts and never fully addressed her rationale for having a private server — or, as the FBI investigation wound up finding, multiple private servers — set up for her use as secretary of state.

Public perceptions around the story seem fixed — and not, of course, in Clinton’s favor. Last month’s ABC News/Washington Post poll found 56 percent disapproval of her handling of the email story, and her struggles with voters who question her honesty and trustworthiness are well established.

As for Clinton’s opponent, his flaws aside, he is well equipped to take advantage of storylines like this one. His core appeal is based on the sense that the system is rigged; the events of the past eight days feed those perceptions in ways Trump is primed to exploit.

Few minds will be changed by what played out on two tarmacs and beyond over the past few days. But the events encapsulate concerns over Clinton’s candidacy, even as she employs the most powerful of surrogates to advance her campaign message.