Rieder: It’s high time for Clinton to let press in,
Regularly answering reporters’ questions really isn’t asking much
It’s clear that Hillary Clinton is someone who can meet a challenge.
Once the prohibitive front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, she overcame a heartbreaking defeat at the hands of an inspirational upstart named Barack Obama, serving as her bitter rival’s secretary of State, and then giving the race for the White House another go.
She took on her Republican foes during a marathon 11-hour hearing on GOP shibboleth Benghazi and essentially cleaned their clocks. And at long last she has shaken off a surprisingly tough challenge from a stubborn socialist named Bernie Sanders to become the Democrats’ presumptive nominee in 2016.
So, as she basks in the glow of her triumph, I’ve got another challenge for her: Let the sunshine in. Stop avoiding reporters. Start answering their questions on a regular basis. Hold a press conference.
Madame Secretary, pick up this gauntlet. You can do it. Really. While it seems like Clinton hasn’t given a press conference since the day of Meghan Trainor’s birth, it’s actually not that long. Just about six months. And reporters traveling with her on the hustings have very few opportunities to ask questions of the would-be leader of the free world.
This isn’t a problem for the media. It’s a problem for the American people, who deserve to know where she stands on the issues of the day.
My colleague Jefferson Graham experienced Clinton’s press avoidance firsthand recently when he covered a rally of hers in California in late May. A State Department report had just concluded that Clinton hadn’t followed the rules when she used a private email server while secretary of State. Graham asked a press representative if he could get a comment from Clinton. The press rep said she’d get back to him. She didn’t.
So Graham asked the traveling press corps about the candidate’s media availability. There wasn’t really much of it, he was told. Maybe he should try shouting a question at her. The result: No answer. Clinton’s antipathy for the press is widely known. And when she does meet with reporters, the results often aren’t pretty. A case in point was a press conference in March 2015, when she at last confronted the burgeoning email controversy. While conceding that she had perhaps made a mistake, Clinton was the opposite of transparent. She was guarded, grudging and imperious. Rather than calming the furor, she exacerbated it. As the great Talleyrand once said, it was not only a dis- grace, it was a mistake.
Things were hardly better five months later when Clinton flippantly answered a question about whether the notorious server had been wiped: “Like with a cloth or something?”
Such encounters do nothing but reinforce the view that Clinton is defensive, haughty and entitled. Not good. But people who know Clinton well say that’s not the real Hillary. She’s actually warm, engaging, funny, they say. Rather than resembling Obama’s famous line, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” she’s actually quite likable. If that’s the case, she would be much better off if she would show it to the public and the press.
Maybe with her history-making victory as the first woman presidential nominee of a major party, she can relax a little and show us her human side.
Hillaryland disputes the notion that the candidate is hiding from the news media.
“Oftentimes ... we will do an ‘avail’ — what would be known as an avail to the people in your business — where she informally comes out after an event has concluded, after she’s taken some photos and some selfies, and she will literally stand there for 15, 20 minutes and answer questions from her traveling press corps, including the embeds from the various networks,” Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon said Sun- day on CNN’s Reliable Sources.
Which would be great if true. But it turns out these scrums don’t take place quite as “oftentimes” as Fallon suggests.
ABC News did a little of that pesky fact-checking and found that there had been just nine of those “avails” since January, and none lasted longer than 10 minutes. Most were far shorter. The last took place a month ago, on May 9, a 21⁄ minute colloquy in Stone Ridge, Va.
In fact, when Clinton met with reporters in Minnesota on March 1, it was Garbo Talks-style headline news on ABC.com: “Hillary Clinton Takes Questions From Her Traveling Press for First Time in 88 Days.”
Now that the nomination seems to be hers, it’s time for a 180. She should open herself up to the journalists, in their role as representatives of the American people. Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP candidate, has made no secret of his contempt for the press. But he has been far more willing to take questions.
When Obama was running in 2008, he once fled rather than answer questions from the Chicago
Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet and other scribes. The political blog Hotline asked, “If he can’t face Lynn Sweet, how can he face Al- Qaeda?”
Given all you have been through, Secretary Clinton, this seems like something you should be able to handle.