2/28/2014 | The New York Times
(Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2013 leaving the State Department, where news media coverage was generally favorable.)
WASHINGTON — Soon after Hillary Rodham Clinton left the State Department, her longtime spokesman talked wistfully about their paradise lost.
“We knew the golden age was coming to an end,” Philippe Reines said.
Mr. Reines was referring to the coverage Mrs. Clinton received from the State Department press corps — in his view, a substantive, high-minded and worldly lot who diligently covered her diplomatic travels and policy initiatives. They were, Mr. Reines explained, in sharp contrast to “the parallel press corps” of political reporters who have scrutinized Mrs. Clinton’s every utterance, scratched at any scent of scandal and speculated about her ambitions since she first refused to bake cookies.
As Mrs. Clinton has now moved back into that parallel universe ahead of a potential second presidential run in 2016, Mr. Reines and the other press operatives entrusted to guard her image remain armored and armed against a media they believe has it in for the former first lady. But some veterans of past Clinton campaigns think her bunker mentality toward the press is outdated, and that it is the couple’s own psychological baggage that could hurt her chances.
After all, Mrs. Clinton has simply outlasted many of her old combatants — real and imagined — from the media wars of the 1990s. In their place is a virtual clean slate of Clinton reporters whose formative experiences with her come from the last campaign or her time as a senator. Some of the babies ready to board the 2016 campaign bus were actually babies in the 1990s.
“I wasn’t politically engaged in that time,” said Ruby Cramer, a reporter who was in single digits at the time of the Whitewater scandal and who covers Mrs. Clinton for BuzzFeed, the attention-grabbing Web publication whose news operation was not yet conceived in 2008. She has written pieces surveying Mrs. Clinton’s support in Iowa and profiling her chief donors in California, but other than receiving warnings about the Clinton press operation, she said. “I don’t think I came with any baggage.”
Mrs. Clinton’s press strategy will have a critical bearing on her political fortunes, especially as she faces earlier and more extensive coverage than any potential candidate in history. Reporters at a raft of publications, including this one, are treating Mrs. Clinton as a beat, an exceptional development for an undeclared candidate two years out from an election.
How and if Mrs. Clinton engages that press offers the first hint of the tone her possible campaign could strike in 2016, and whether it would be different from the approach of 2008, 2006, 2000, 1996 and 1992.
Mrs. Clinton’s media skepticism is a longstanding condition. In 1995, Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary in Bill Clinton’s first presidential term, wrote about the first lady’s aversion to the national Washington media. That memo was among nearly 4,000 Clinton White House documents made public by the National Archives on Friday, the latest entry in a flurry of AOL-era flashbacks.
As a national figure for three decades, half of which has been spent representing or residing in the media capital of the world, Mrs. Clinton is encountering at least her third wave of political reporters. Through Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, the vast right-wing conspiracy, the Senate candidate carpetbagger era, the Suha Arafat kiss, the presidential flirtations and finally the 2008 campaign, she has developed and maintained an attitude skeptical of the press. (“HC says press has big egos and no brains,” Mrs. Clinton’s late friend Diane Blair wrote in her personal papers during the 1993 White House Travel Office scandal.)
Most reporters acknowledge that Mrs. Clinton’s perception of them as enemy combatants is not entirely irrational. But it is a view that has not always served her well.
In the 2008 presidential primaries, as Mrs. Clinton challenged an upstart media sweetheart, Barack Obama, many reporters in her press corps knew her primarily as the senator from New York and not the former first lady. Nonetheless, Mrs. Clinton kept those reporters at bay and failed to employ the charm offensive of which she is highly capable. Only on the eve of the disastrous Iowa caucuses, when relations between the campaign and reporters had already broken down, did she venture onto the press bus with coffee and bagels. “I didn’t want you to feel deprived,” she said during a visit that lasted one minute and 28 seconds. Hardly anyone ate a bagel.
Some Clinton veterans point out that while young reporters might not come into the campaign with chips on their shoulders, they often answer to editors who have their own Clinton histories.
“On one hand, you’ve got reporters in their early 20s whose direct experience watching her is as a largely praised secretary of state and a glass-ceiling shattering presidential candidate,” said Blake Zeff, a former spokesman for Mrs. Clinton who is now the political editor at Salon. “On the other, you have older editors who come at this with a much longer view, steeped in old fights dating back to the 1990s and the Senate.”
To the extent that Mrs. Clinton is following the old playbook of stiff-arming the media, so far it seems to be working out just fine. Polls show her as a prohibitive favorite — for now —and there is no candidate on the horizon who seems capable of generating the media heat Mr. Obama did. Mrs. Clinton’s presumed supremacy has generated a virtual cottage industry of Democratic press operatives working on speculation to boost Mrs. Clinton and police her coverage.
While some of those pro bono boosters have sought to woo new reporters on the Clinton beat, there is still built-in skepticism about the media’s intentions. “What’s the point?” said a former Clinton press operative about shifting to a strategy of greater engagement when interest in Mrs. Clinton is already so intense, and when any tiny error could be amplified.
Sometimes, Mrs. Clinton’s press handlers can seem more obsessed with the past and perceived institutional biases than the reporters covering her. The two veterans who essentially run the Clinton press operation — Matt McKenna, a Montana-based strategist employed by Mr. Clinton and his foundation, and Mr. Reines, who works for Mrs. Clinton — are both known to keep blacklists.
But it is Mr. Reines, varyingly caustic and charming, who is the ultimate Clinton survivalist and the operative who perhaps most embodies his boss’s tortured relationship with the press. He has resided in Hillaryland for almost his entire career and developed a less than favorable view of the political press, comparing it to the hungry T-rex in Jurassic Park. “If you stand still, it doesn’t notice you. But once you move even a little bit it’s on the scent and you can’t get rid of it,” he said.
Mr. Reines, who was sidelined for much of the 2008 campaign, benefited from his exile as he found himself well positioned to follow Mrs. Clinton to the State Department, where he traveled with her extensively and entered her inner orbit. He is now considered a Clinton lifer.
On Thursday on the enclosed rooftop of the W hotel, Mr. Reines arrived late to the book party for “HRC,” a new book that describes Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department in a mostly positive light. His mere presence was a reminder to the myriad reporters and pundits in the room of the Clinton press shop’s Golden Rule: “We treat others in the way they treat us.”
As reporters gravitated toward him, Mr. Reines laughed with one of the book’s authors and then sipped the evening’s signature champagne cocktail. It was called the State Secret.