http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/hillary-clinton-already-president-media-relations-118113.html?hp=t1_r#.VVyBvkaGMYsYour Normal Rules Don’t Apply to Hillary Clinton
She’s treating the media as if she were already president.
By JACK SHAFER
May 19, 2015
What the press still fails to appreciate about Hillary Clinton is that she’s not running for president, she’s running as president, and all the usual rules about when and how she should speak don’t apply to her. In her mind—and who can blame her?—she’s the incumbent, this is a reelection campaign, and she occupies a place miles above the liquescent bogs of petty politics into which reporters would dunk her. A president is better seen than heard, she believes, hence her extended “listening tour.”
“The words of the president have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately,” as President Calvin Coolidge once put it.
The press isn’t buying that, of course, so every time Clinton dons her media-deflecting shroud in public, reporters attempt to tear it off, like Tuesday in Cedar Falls, Iowa. After 28 days of shaking off reporters’ questions like a fussy major-league pitcher, and after answering only 13 queries since announcing her candidacy, Clinton finally fielded a few at a forum and volleyed in a way guaranteed to make almost no news.
When not running for president, a politician can do almost any indiscriminate thing without suffering embarrassment or damage. President Barack Obama proved that yesterday by launching his own Twitter account, @POTUS. Obama presented himself as the anti-Coolidge, promptly engaging in a little Twitter towel-snapping with Bill Clinton, our former president. By virtue of their media leverage, Clinton and Obama can set the terms of engagement—or disengagement, if you will—and burn endless news cycles however they wish.
There’s nothing new about politicians creating busy work for journalists. As my friend the media historian David Greenberg notes in his biography of Coolidge, Silent Cal actually knew how to speak English and met routinely with reporters to help them fill their notebooks. Coolidge required reporters to submit their questions in writing, picked which questions to answer, and stipulated that they attribute his comments to “a White House spokesman.” He also availed himself to new media to shape the news, Greenberg writes. He gave the first nationwide inaugural address via radio and appeared in such short films as this folksy visit to his Vermont summer home, “Visitin’ ’Round at Coolidge Corners.”
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