THE POTEMKIN CAMPAIGNTHE POTEMKIN CAMPAIGN
It makes zero difference how many questions [Hillary] Clinton has asked average Americans. Like, none. If those people were running for president, then I would be super-interested. . . . But, they aren’t. She is.
—Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza
From the outset of her campaign, Hillary adopted a classic Rose Garden strategy.
That term was first popularized during the election campaign of 1976, when Gerald Ford spent most of his time in the Oval Office, which overlooks the Rose Garden, and limited his travel around the country. In recent years, the term has come to have a broader meaning: it refers to a candidate who refuses to hold press conferences and engage in question-and-answer sessions with reporters.
Hillary’s Rose Garden strategy was aimed at making her more likeable.
“Her aides are planning a different sort of campaign this time around,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Nicholas. “Mrs. Clinton will be meeting with small clusters of voters in diners, coffee shops and private homes. She won’t always have a prepared speech in front of her. Her advisers predict voters will see a less scripted, more disarming candidate than was on display eight years ago. . . . ‘She needs to try to humanize herself, because in some ways she’s kind of become a cardboard cutout figure,’ says Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University.
“These aren’t the first set of Hillary Clinton aides to grapple with the likeability factor,” the Journal’s Nicholas continued. “For a quarter century, Clinton staffers, at one time or another, have cast about for a formula that would broaden Mrs. Clinton’s appeal and combat perceptions that she is an unsympathetic figure.”
The failed strategy of the past failed once again.
In the first month of her campaign, Hillary was severely criticized for ducking the media and taking only eight questions from reporters (or thirteen, depending on whom you asked). As Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post pointed out, that came to one question every 3.6 days. And most of her answers weren’t answers at all.
Some examples:
Q: You lost Iowa in 2008. How do you win this time? What’s your strategy?
Hillary: I’m having a great time. Can’t look forward any more than I am.
Q: What about campaign finance reform?
Hillary: We do have a plan. We have a plan for my plan.
Q: How do you respond to criticism that your campaign is too staged?
Hillary: This is exactly what I want to do. I want to hear from people in New Hampshire about what’s on their minds.
One of the things reporters wanted to ask Hillary was what would happen to the Clinton Foundation if she were elected president.
“Who would be able to raise money for the Clinton Foundation?” Julie Pace of the Associated Press asked. “Could it begin new projects, both at home and overseas? Is there any way it could operate unburdened by conflicts of interest, real or perceived, while one of its founders sits in the Oval Office?”
On these and all other important issues, Hillary remained silent.
Frustrated in its attempt to get access to the candidate, the New York Times posted an item on its First Draft blog titled “Questions for Hillary Clinton: Immigration.” Amy Chozick, the Times correspondent assigned to cover Hillary, explained: “This is the first installment of a regular First Draft feature in which The Times will publish questions we would have asked Mrs. Clinton had we had the opportunity.”
The Washington Post followed suit. It posted an online clock that counted the minutes since Hillary had answered a press question.
In her first thirty days, Hillary did not hold a single campaign event in New Hampshire that was open to the general public. She spent six days on campaign events and seven on fund-raising. She appeared at sixteen fund-raisers in New York, Washington, D.C., and California, raising about $1.1 million from some of the wealthiest people in America—the same 1 percent she excoriated in her speeches.
Before she started running, Hillary had promised she wouldn’t campaign like the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia making a royal progress through the provinces.
But that’s exactly what she did. Everywhere she went, her handlers erected a kind of modern-day Potemkin village for the TV cameras. She was televised against artful backgrounds chatting with carefully screened schoolchildren and devoted Hillary enthusiasts.
“The reality is that Clinton’s avoidance of the press is a product of weakness, not the result of a shrewd campaign bypassing the media because it can,” wrote Josh Kraushaar, the political editor for National Journal. “She may be avoiding short-term pain by sticking to her script, but she’s creating an imperial image of herself that’s hard to reverse—and one the media has every incentive to reinforce.
“If the real reason Clinton’s handlers don’t want her to meet the press is out of fear—fear that she’ll sound politically tone-deaf or get caught fibbing—that’s as much a sign of her campaign’s anxiety as it is a savvy strategy,” Kraushaar continued. “The fear of making a mistake extends to her interactions with voters. Most of her appearances so far have been with supporters who have been vetted and prescreened by the campaign.”
At one point during Hillary’s visit to Council Bluffs, Iowa, her Secret Service chauffeur pulled her Scooby Doo van into a parking spot reserved for the handicapped. The van remained there while Hillary ducked into a meeting with a group of Democratic activists. Before the meeting began, the participants had to hand over their cameras and cell phones.
Hillary left Council Bluffs without a trace.
At a campaign event in Cedar Falls, which was hosted by billionaire Fred Eychaner, who had given more than $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, a reporter finally managed to put Hillary on the spot. Fox News’s Ed Henry asked her if she might speak to the press.
Hillary went into her tough-dude mode and mocked Ed Henry for asking the question.
“Yeah,” she said with a derisive laugh, “maybe when I finish talking to the people here, how about that? I might. I’ll have to ponder it, but I will put it on my list for due consideration.”
Her contempt for the press and her consuming fear of exposure reached paranoid personality disorder symptoms during a Fourth of July parade in Gorham, New Hampshire. As she walked down the street, waving to the crowds, her aides kept reporters away from the candidate by herding them behind a fat white rope.
“Spectacle of Clinton as candidate—press being pulled along with a rope,” tweeted the New York Times’ campaign correspondent Maggie Haberman.
“Hang ’em high, Hillary,” wrote Politico’s Roger Simon. “Hang those pesky reporters who fly around the country to cover your every event in order to quote what you say and what people say to you. Hogtie them! String them up. Or, at the very least, rope-a-dope them.”
When Hillary finally agreed to answer questions about her e-mails and the Clinton Foundation, she offered what New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin described as “mush.” To Goodwin’s ear, Hillary sounded like the old Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt, who defended “honest graft” and said of his riches, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”