Accused rapist Bill Cosby has much in common with Hillary Clinton

Bill Cosby appears to be headed for a criminal trial in Pennsylvania for his alleged sexual misconduct a dozen years ago.

The very first album of any kind I ever bought as a kid was "More of the Best of Bill Cosby."

My friends and I owned all of his records (if you're under 30, when I say "record" just think "vinyl").

We would memorize and recite Cosby's routines to each other down to the last inflection.

Father and daughter at the football game? 200 MPH? Noah?

We knew every word.

We grew up watching him on “I Spy,” without realizing how unique it was that an African American actor finally had a leading role on a TV show.

And then halfway through Ed Sullivan, we'd switch over to see the original Cosby show; the Huxtables were a dozen years into the future.

I loved Bill Cosby.

Loved, loved, loved him.

Finally got to see him live twice, both times in the last five years.

Took Mom to see him do standup — or more accurately, sit-down comedy — and he killed for two hours.

At age 75.

Also got to see him speak at one of those big motivational events, where he and a half dozen other superstars get wedged in between the guy selling real estate careers and the guy showing you how to take over the stock market.

His message at the motivational event: "I know."

Meaning that if you tell someone, "Smoking's bad for you," or "You're eating too much ice cream," they never deny it.

They just say, "I know," as if awareness were enough to make the problem go away.

Someone should have said to Cosby, "Bill, you can't allegedly drug women and have sex with them and get away with it forever."

But he probably would have just said, "I know."

When the drumbeat of accusations came out against him a year ago, I had lunch with one of the top PR people in America.

Asked him how he would have handled it.

He shook his head.

"Cosby's guy is doing it all wrong," he said firmly. "He isn't responding to the stories. That's why they're multiplying.

"You've got to get ahead of bad news. You can't let it just bury you."

What would you advise Cosby, I asked.

"After the very first accusation," he said, "I would have had Cosby conduct a press conference. He would have stood up there and said, 'Look. It was the 1970s. Drugs were everywhere. I was young, rich, famous, good-looking — why would I have needed to drug women to get sex? It doesn't make sense!'

"And with that," my friend concluded, "the story would have gone away."

And instead, since Cosby's advisers told him to keep still and not dignify the accusations with responses, he's likely going to stand trial on a 12-year-old charge.

What's the connection to Hillary Clinton?

At some point, someone must have said to her, "You can't use a home-brew server when you're Secretary of State."

She likely would have responded, like someone in Cosby's routine from the motivational seminar, "I know."

And she would have done it anyway.

And now the story just won't die, further diminishing the credibility of a candidate who for at least half the country isn't believed, or beloved.

Got bad news? Get ahead of it. It's not the wrongdoing that gets people in trouble; it's letting the bad news fester.

It's true for celebrities and for us regular folk - at home, at work, anywhere there's something we need to acknowledge.

Will Cosby go to prison? At age 78?

Will Clinton lose the White House in a year that, by all accounts, should have been her year?

And what will either of them say if someone says, "You shouldn't have let the bad news just snowball?"

They'll both say the same thing:

I know.

Michael Levin, a 12-time bestselling author, runs BusinessGhost.com, a provider of ghostwriting and publishing services.