Hillary Clinton's Quiet Self-Sabotage
The Democrat’s flight from the media is reinforcing her weaknesses—and putting distance between her and the voters she needs most.
May 26, 2015 Hillary Clinton is avoiding the media at her own peril.
I say this not as a self-interested political journalist, but as a hard-headed analyst befuddled by her campaign strategy. She's hoping to emulate President Obama's coolness to reach out to less-engaged voters, but by avoiding basic questions from the press, she comes across as an entitled celebrity, not a former secretary of State getting due scrutiny for a presidential campaign. Far from being the authentic politician that Obama worked to be, she's sidestepped crucial questions over where she stands on fast-track trade authority, details on her proposed immigration policy, and a possible nuclear deal with Iran. She's barely even talked about her central professional accomplishment—over four years representing the country as secretary of State. How is this supposed to win voters over?
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. 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 she doesn't have a credible response to explain her use of a private unsecured email server, Republicans will eagerly fill the void with attack ads casting her in the most unfavorable light possible. Even if voters aren't following every detail about her conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation, the constant unfavorable news coverage is bound to trickle down to voters. For a candidate looking to find a "warm, purple space" to unify the country, these controversies hit where it hurts the most.
So far, it's hard to see how the ignore-the-press strategy is working. In fact, there are many obvious signs suggesting that Clinton's aloofness has hurt her image since kicking off her campaign. Her favorability numbers are now indistinguishable from several of the leading Republican presidential contenders. A late-April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found an equal number of respondents viewing her favorably as unfavorably (42/42), with her unfavorables jumping six points in a month's time. Only one-quarter of voters regarded her as trustworthy and honest, a double-digit drop from last year's standing. Even though she's a well-known politician, her numbers have been surprisingly volatile this early in the campaign, with no guarantee of stabilizing.
One of the biggest warning signs come from a group that she's been assiduously courting: Democratic millennials. Follow Clinton's Twitter feed, and you'll see a steady stream of base-pleasing shout-outs for gay rights ("Well done, Ireland," she wrote Saturday on the country's gay-marriage referendum), celebrity referencesto underscore her hipness, even a promotion for a Clinton-branded pantsuit T-shirt. But a new Pew Research Center poll found that her support among younger Democratic voters has dipped significantly over the past year. Her favorability with that core voting group is down to 72 percent, the lowest among all the party's constituencies tested, and a 15-point drop since 2007. For all the talk that the media has become passe among younger voters, it's likely that the unfavorable coverage has impacted their perception of Clinton.
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