Care Taken to Protect Hillary Clinton’s Image May Be Hurting Her Campaign : Peter Nicholas
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/07/06/care-taken-to-protect-hillary-clintons-image-may-be-hurting-her-campaign/
One of the assurances made by Team Clinton at the start of her latest presidential run was that her campaign would have a different look and feel than her failed attempt in 2008.
Hillary Clinton would be more accessible, her staff “footprint” would be smaller, relations with the press corps would be less chilly.
That promise is proving tough to keep.Over the weekend, Mrs. Clinton turned up for a Fourth of July parade with an entourage that deployed ropes to corral the reporters covering her march through the streets of Gorham, N.H.
A presidential campaign is a messy thing. People shout questions. Hecklers appear out of nowhere. It’s unavoidable. And, in some ways, testing candidates in a variety of unpredictable situations is valuable.
Nearly three months after entering the race, Mrs. Clinton seems to be insisting on a level of control that may be unsustainable in the age of social media and camera phones.
Even some Democrats said they were unnerved by the parade images. “I love Hillary Clinton, but this is the worst visual metaphor,” Van Jones, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, said Sunday on CNN.
The care given to protecting Mrs. Clinton’s image has been long in the making. At Clinton Global Initiative events, reporters are often confined to filing rooms and escorted to panel discussions. A New York Times reporter last year was accompanied into the ladies room by a young CGI press aide who waited outside the stall.
A batch of emails released last week by the State Department in response to a public records request show how senior staff and friends gamed out ways to attract the most flattering coverage when Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. One aide wrote to her in a 2009 email that she would be doing an interview with Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren and described her as “malleable.” A longtime friend told Mrs. Clinton that same year that Leslie Gelb, a former New York Times columnist, wanted to write an article on her for Parade magazine and guaranteed the piece would be positive.
As the overwhelming front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Mrs. Clinton may reckon that she can wage the campaign on her own terms at least at this early stage, speaking on issues at a time and place of her choosing.
That strategy carries certain risks, potentially reinforcing the view–and helping other candidates reinforce the view–that she is a celebrity insulated from people whose votes she needs.
At a backyard campaign stop last month, one of Mrs. Clinton’s rivals, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, gave a prepared speech and then invited people to ask questions.
“This is Iowa,” Mr. O’Malley said. “If a presidential candidate isn’t doing Q&A, they’re not worth their salt.”
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