H4a news Clips [April 11, 2015] Summary of Today’s news


Hillary Clinton Team Holds Off-The-Record Journalist Meeting Ahead Of 2016 Announcement [Michael Calderone, HuffPost, April 10, 2015]



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Hillary Clinton Team Holds Off-The-Record Journalist Meeting Ahead Of 2016 Announcement [Michael Calderone, HuffPost, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton's campaign team held an off-the-record dinner Thursday night in Washington, D.C., for roughly two dozen journalists and staff members at John Podesta's house. The team will also hold a private event for journalists Friday evening.
NEW YORK -- Hillary Clinton's campaign team held an off-the-record dinner Thursday night in Washington, D.C., for roughly two dozen journalists and staff members at John Podesta's house, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The dinner signals that the Clinton team is trying to engage with top reporters in the days before the former secretary of state's expected announcement of a 2016 presidential run. It also suggests the new campaign team is looking to change course from the toxic relationship with the press that plagued the 2008 race.
Podesta, the campaign chairman and a seasoned cook, made a pasta with walnut sauce for the dinner guests, which included reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and several major TV networks.
A Huffington Post reporter attended the dinner, but did not discuss it with this reporter.
The guests also enjoyed a shrimp appetizer, homemade cookies, and a selection of wine and beer -- including, appropriately, Brooklyn Lager.
Several key Clinton staffers, including Campaign Manager Robby Mook, Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and top aide Huma Abedin, also attended.
A Clinton spokesman declined to comment on the gathering.
Clinton has long had a fraught relationship with the media, going back to scandals and controversies during her husband's presidency in the 1990s. But in recent months, Clinton sources have promised that the 2016 campaign would be different.
She took questions from the press for about 15 minutes last month following revelations that she exclusively used a private email account for government business throughout her four years as secretary of state, but hasn't since given an interview.
During a journalism awards ceremony late last month, Clinton suggested she wanted a fresh start with the Fourth Estate.
"I am all about new beginnings," Clinton said. "A new grandchild, a new email account. Why not a new relationship with the press? So here it goes. No more secrecy. No more zone of privacy. But first of all, before I go any further. If you look under your chairs, you'll find a simple nondisclosure agreement."
Hillary Clinton team woos reporters [Dylan Byers, POLITICO, April 10, 2015]
On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta held a private dinner at his Washington home with campaign reporters.
On Thursday night, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta held a private dinner at his Washington home with campaign reporters, part of a larger Clinton-team effort to build a rapport with the men and women who will spend the next 18 months covering Clinton’s bid for the White House, POLITICO has learned.
That effort is seen as a necessity for a candidate who, in the early months of 2015, has had no safe harbor in the media. To date, The New York Times alone has published more than 40 articles related to Clinton’s use of a private email account while secretary of state, and many other news outlets, including POLITICO, have come forward with revelations of their own. Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets criticize her daily and left-wing outlets are unabashed in their desire for a more liberal alternative.
Just last month, Clinton herself acknowledged that her relationship with the media was “complicated,” but said she wanted to build “a better relationship.” Without a formal campaign in place, however, she has been forced to assume a defensive posture. Now, with the launch of her campaign just around the corner, political strategists say the candidate and her team are set to wrest control of the narrative and go on offense.
“Politics, especially political reporters, abhor a vacuum, so media outlets are going to hunt and peck for stories that create the dynamic of the campaign being a yet-unannounced HRC presidential vs. the august members of the Fourth Estate,” Chris Lehane, the Democratic communications strategist and Clinton White House alum, told POLITICO. “Once the campaign is off and running like Usain Bolt, based on the big idea she offers as her rationale, it will develop specific reporters and outlets that take a franchise interest.”
The current state of Clinton-press relations reflects “the natural lay of things. She’s not a candidate, there’s not an affirmative message yet, and there’s not yet an apparatus fully capable of combatting [these stories],” said Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesperson. Merrill confirmed that the Clinton team had media outreach plans in the works, but said he was not in a position to discuss them.
Being able to go on the offensive is especially important for a candidate like Clinton, who has few sympathizers in the media. Supporters have long grumbled that the Times and its mainstream brethren are especially tough on Clinton — the newspaper’s executive editor Dean Baquet calls the coverage “aggressive and fair” — but the past six weeks have only increased their fears. Meanwhile, right-wing media outlets have been using the new revelations to relentlessly attack her, while left-wing publications have been busy pushing their own populist alternatives.
The trifecta of right-wing attacks, left-wing angst and mainstream scrutiny has already made for a far rockier campaign rollout than Clinton likely anticipated. Though a mid-March CNN/ORC poll had her beating every potential Republican challenger by double digits, a new Quinnipiac University poll released this week shows that her support has been “wilting” in the key battleground states of Colorado, Iowa and Virginia. In each state, a majority of those surveyed said that Clinton’s private email use was either “very important” or “somewhat important” to their vote in 2016, and well more than a third of voters in each state said the issue made them less likely to vote for Clinton.
While the formal launch of a campaign will allow Clinton to take some control into her own hands, the absence of a viable primary challenger could pose its own problems, strategists said. With no real competitor, the media will be all the more eager to assume an antagonistic role.
“In the absence of a primary opponent, the press may feel obliged to fill that role, giving her the scrutiny and vetting normally provided by an opponent,” Paul Begala, the political consultant and chief strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, said. “If so, there is not much Hillary can do about it, nor should she try.”
Of the three sectors of American political media, it is the mainstream that has emerged as Clinton’s greatest obstacle. The fact that the hardest-hitting Clinton coverage has come from the Times, The Washington Post, POLITICO and other mainstream sources — rather than, say, The Weekly Standard or Washington Free Beacon — has revived concerns among her staff about Clinton’s poor relations with mainstream reporters.
“We have been aggressive and fair,” Baquet, the Times executive editor, said of his newspaper’s coverage of Clinton. “I’d say that’s been the same for coverage of all the candidates. Some of the Republicans have gone so far as to say they don’t read us. If everyone thinks you’re tough, you’re doing something right.”
In the past few weeks, Gawker and ProPublica have opened a new vein of Clinton coverage. On March 27, the two sites reported that longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then-Secretary Clinton “gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.” Days later, Gawker reported that Blumenthal and another Clinton official had secretly lobbied Clinton “on behalf of a billionaire in the former Soviet state of Georgia who was seeking closer ties with Putin’s Russia — seemingly in violation of a federal law designed to prevent foreign powers from covertly wielding influence within the United States.”
Critical coverage in outlets like the Times and ProPublica is far more dangerous to Clinton’s campaign than that of partisan outlets, strategists say, because the scrutiny is driven by reporting, rather than ideological analysis (there are exceptions with Gawker, which can be quite opinionated). Weeks of Fox News roundtables about Benghazi conspiracy theories don’t pack nearly the punch that a groundbreaking report from the Times can.
Merrill, the Clinton spokesperson, said he didn’t have a problem with the Times’ aggressive approach to the email scandal, especially since they broke the story. He was less forgiving of the Gawker-ProPublica report: “ProPublica, to be honest, I think my response to somebody who asked me that was just, ‘Seriously?’” (ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg did not respond to a request for comment regarding Merrill’s criticism.)
The drumbeat of investigations from the Times and other mainstream outlets might be more tolerable if Clinton had more allies on the left. Unfortunately for her, liberal pundits like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, and progressive publications like The Nation and The New Republic have seem more interested in floating alternatives like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.
Late last year, The Nation made it its stated mission to find a populist challenger. Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine’s editor, told POLITICO that Clinton “would be better served if she has competition.” In Harper’s, Doug Henwood slammed Clinton as a hawkish centrist, a charge that has been echoed directly or indirectly across the liberal blogosphere and even on MSNBC.
“The Elizabeth Warren piece of it does make it tough for her with Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and those guys,” said Bill Burton, the Democratic strategist and former Obama deputy press secretary. “It is a challenge.”
Then there are the right-wing publications, which attack Democrats as a matter of course. To date, however, right-wing attacks on Clinton have been relatively muted, in part because several conservative sites are focused on the Republican primary. Behind the scenes, however, Republican groups are building a massive opposition effort, much of which will be leaked to conservative and mainstream outlets over the course of the next 18 months.
Clinton may never be able to quell the right, but by launching her campaign, she can at least make progress on the left and the mainstream, the strategists said.
“[The] campaign will convert some of the current entities by (a) being on the offensive and creating the conflict that drives coverage on its own terms; (b) filling the cup so that reporters can provide their daily quota of inches, clicks, tweets and retweets; and (c) demonstrate [the] capacity of the candidate where she can look like a giant towering over the sea of leprechauns across the aisle,” Lehane explained.
“In this day and age,” he added, “the ability to develop a national online network will provide a bulwark of support and be available to serve as both a sword to push out her candidacy and a shield to deflect the incoming.”
Of course, not everyone is so bullish.
“You do get the sense that it’s coming at her from all sides,” said one Democratic strategist who asked not to be quoted by name. “You do wonder if at some point she’s taking so much water that it all falls apart.”
Library documents show revisions on Hillary Clinton’s image, identity [Rebecca Ballhaus, WSJ Washington Wire, April 10, 2015]
While the Clintons were in the White House, Hillary Clinton’s advisers worked hard to strike a balance between portraying the first lady as a mother and wife and as a political figure in her own right.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—While the Clintons were in the White House, Hillary Clinton’s advisers worked hard to strike a balance between portraying the first lady as a mother and wife and as a political figure in her own right.
As such, a 1997 Q&A with Mrs. Clinton for a Scottish newspaper, the Press and Journal, came under plenty of scrutiny.
Edits to Mrs. Clinton’s answers reflect her staffers’ efforts to show the first lady’s admiration of Bill Clinton as a president but also as a husband. In one draft, a reference to Mr. Clinton as “my President” is changed to “my husband.” In the same draft, a section in which Mrs. Clinton described the president as “optimistic” and “determined” received a key addition: “On a more personal level, I think he is a great father and husband.”
The drafts were found in a folder containing the records of Michael O’Mary, who was a speechwriter in the first lady’s office. The documents were part of a trove of paper records released this week by the William J. Clinton Library. Unlike releases made last year, these files weren’t released in electronic form.
The author or authors of the edits aren’t clearly identified, and the exact sequence of the drafts isn’t clear.
One section on how the Clintons met received particular scrutiny. Copies of several drafts show repeated changes to the story, which appeared to waffle between a variation of these two narratives:
“I met my husband at Yale Law School. We met at the library, where, after I caught him looking at me, I introduced myself to him. Later, he joined me in a long line to register for classes, and we talked and talked. Before we knew it, we had walked all the way to the university art museum, where Bill showed me some of his favorite sculptures.”
And:
“I met my husband at Yale Law School. We met at the library where I introduced myself to him. Later, he joined me in a long line to register for classes, and we talked for an hour. When we got to the front of the line, the registrar said, ‘Bill, what are you doing here? You already registered?’”
Staffers also struggled with how to answer the question, “What is your greatest ambition?” What appears to be an early draft answered: “To be a responsible and loving mother and wife and to instill values in my daughter that will serve her well as she grows up and has to navigate through a complicated world.” Scribbled underneath was another line geared more toward portraying Mrs. Clinton as a political figure: “Second, to live up to the American ideal of citizenship.”
Similarly, the answer to “How would you best like to be remembered?” was expanded to portray Mrs. Clinton not just as a supporter of her husband but as a champion of human rights. One draft showed this answer: “For using this rare opportunity to support my President and his vision of where to take our country on the eve of a new century.” In what appears to have been a later draft, this was added: “I also hope to use the platform I have to speak out for people on the margins of society, especially women and children, who too often don’t have a voice in the political, social, economic and civil life of their countries.”
Among the questions Mrs. Clinton and her staff declined to answer: “What is the first thing you would do if all your numbers came up in the Lottery?” and “What is the most embarrassing situation you have found yourself in?”
The edits reflect the tension for Mrs. Clinton’s staff in representing a first lady who was markedly different than her predecessors. Mrs. Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School and became the first female law partner of a law firm in Arkansas after graduating. She became a U.S. senator after leaving the White House and is expected to announce her own presidential campaign as soon as this weekend. Her immediate predecessor, Barbara Bush, by contrast, dropped out of college and didn’t have a professional career before becoming second and then first lady.
Previous documents released by the Clinton Library have demonstrated the struggle her staffers faced in improving Mrs. Clinton’s image. In 1995, a memo detailed her advisers’ suggestions—including Mrs. Clinton appearing as a guest on the TV show “Home Improvement”—for how to make the first lady appear “likeable.” In a 1999 memo, as Mrs. Clinton was preparing her Senate campaign, a memo advised her: “It’s important that people see more sides of you, and they often see you only in very stern situations.”
The impossibility of Hillary Clinton ‘going small’ [Chris Cillizza, WaPo The Fix, April 10, 2015]
Hillary Clinton’s campaign cannot feasibly take a “go small” approach.
The Hillary Clinton for president campaign is coming. For real, this time.
How do I know? Because since late Thursday afternoon when Business Insider reported that Clinton would make an announcement over the weekend, the political world has been ablaze with attempts to nail down the second that this event-we-have-known-was-coming-for-the better-part-of-the-last-year was actually going to happen. The Guardian reported later Thursday that the announcement would come via Twitter Sunday at noon -- followed by a trip to Iowa. Then, early this morning, CNN confirmed that the announcement was coming Sunday, potentially with a video published on social media.  Then the Post confirmed it. And NBC. And everyone else.
The feeding frenzy was officially on.
The furor created by the exact date and time Clinton would announce her candidacy speaks to the total and complete impossibility of Clinton carrying off a "going small" strategy that she and her team seem set on pursuing.  Wrote Dan Balz and Anne Gearan in the Post:
The approach — described by Democratic strategists and advisers familiar with her plans — is intended to address some of the key shortcomings of Clinton’s 2008 run for the White House, when she often came off as flat and overly scripted before large crowds. The go-slow, go-small strategy, these advisers say, plays to her strengths, allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor, humility and policy expertise can show through.
Look, I absolutely get the logic behind the strategy.  Clinton ran as "Hillary Clinton" in 2008, to her detriment.  Her campaign seemed to believe that voters in places like Iowa and New Hampshire would vote for her simply because of her political celebrity.  They believed that Clinton didn't need to do the grip and grin sort of campaigning that other candidates did because she was a beloved member of the first family of Democratic politics.
Unsurprisingly to everyone but those in the Clinton campaign, it didn't work. Clinton came off as aloof and entitled -- two very bad character traits for someone running for president.  People had no sense of how or why she wanted the job or how hard she was willing to work to get it. (Sidebar: One of the reasons her tearing-up moment in New Hampshire in 2008 was so powerful was because it drove home for many voters that she did actually care deeply about the race.)
Because all campaigns are in ways large and small reactions to the campaigns that came before them, you can understand why the "go small" approach makes sense to the Clintons this time around.
And yet, it's almost certainly an impossibility for Clinton and her campaign to truly go small -- for reasons almost entirely out of her control.  Clinton is the biggest non-incumbent frontunner to be a party's presidential nominee in the modern era of politics. She is one of the most famous politicians in the country if not the world. She is part of one of the most famous families in the country if not the world.
"Going small" is as hard for Clinton to do as it would be for Taylor Swift.  Let's say, for example, that T-Swift just wanted to play a few intimate gigs for her most loyal fans with no publicity.  No matter what she did to keep it small, word would leak out that Taylor Swift was playing at some hole in the wall club in fill-in-the-blank town. A mob scene -- fans, media, assorted gawkers -- would immediately assemble. Intimacy gone.
The same goes for Clinton. Because of who she is and where she stands in the presidential race, she will be followed around by an ever-present local, national and international media horde. Wherever she goes, there will be crowds who just want to see her -- take a picture of her, shoot a Vine of her, tweet about her, SnapChat about her. No matter how small Clinton tries to make the campaign, it will always be big -- because of who she is.
That is not to say that Clinton can't more effectively show voters than she did in 2008 that she is running to help them, that her campaign is centered on what they want rather than what she thinks they want. Clinton will do everything she can to make that the central message of this race and, because of that focus, she'll likely do a better job of conveying that message than she did seven years ago.
But, the idea of Clinton going small is a fallacy. It cannot be done.

David Axelrod compli-sults Hillary Clinton [Aaron Blake, WaPo, April 10, 2015]
David Axelrod took to Twitter to give his take on the low-key campaign rollout that has been reported ahead of Sec. Clinton’s announcement.
OK, we're guessing that David Axelrod was trying to be nice to Hillary Clinton with this tweet.
@davidaxelrod: Learning the lessons of 2008: HRC rollout plans stress humility. No Clinton Inc., the "inevitable" juggernaut that left voters behind.
Another reading would be that the former top Obama adviser is doing a little seven-year-old victory dance celebrating Team Obama's against-all-odds victory in the 2008 primary and ribbing Clinton for running a poorly conceived campaign. It's classic compli-sult behavior.
But how against-all-odds was it really? We've dealt with this question before, and our conclusion was that the Obama-ites and others suffer from a little bit of revisionist history when it comes to just how "inevitable" Clinton was back then.
To wit, our own Philip Bump posted this:
...her lead in 2016 is substantially larger than what she enjoyed eight years ago. By way of example. Here's how the polling looked in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 2008, via Real Clear Politics.
Clinton led, often by a wide margin. Her largest lead was just over 21 points. (The numbers above are the Real Clear Polling average, incidentally, not raw poll numbers.)
Iowa was much closer. In fact, Clinton often trailed other candidates, including former North Carolina senator John Edwards.
Her largest lead in Iowa was 7.2 points.
Now compare that to 2016 polling -- which is still early, but a poll taken today is only about 50 days before the start of the polls above.
Hillary Clinton was the front-runner in 2008, ahead of Edwards and Obama, until she wasn't. Clinton is the front-runner for 2016, as well, ahead of a healthy dose of empty space and then Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth "No, Really, I'm Not Running" Warren (D-Mass.). It's a whole different race.
However, that can change.
For all talk about how Clinton was SO inevitable in 2008, we had a hard time finding people who actually said this back then -- much less Team Clinton itself.
From my post:
Going back to 2006 and 2007, we could find very little evidence of anybody publicly calling Clinton the "inevitable" nominee. Here's what we found when we searched in LexisNexis for "Hillary Clinton" and "inevitable":
The Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi, in March 2005: "So, case closed? No other Democrats need apply? That is ridiculous."

Michael Reagan, in December 2006: "The common wisdom holds that it is all but inevitable that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, and that she'll be a formidable if not unbeatable candidate."

Fox News's Brian Wilson, in February 2007: "There was a piece, I forget where, saying that Republicans think that the nomination of Hillary is inevitable. I don't think they believe that."

TNR's Jonathan Chait, in February 2007: "But is Clinton really the front-runner for the nomination? Only if you look about one inch deep. So before we cancel the primaries, it's worth exploring how this wisdom came into circulation."


So basically there were maybe a few examples of people suggesting she might be inevitable, and slightly more people ascribing that view to unnamed other people (who might or might not have existed or been willing to speak on the record).
And then came the New York Times's Adam Nagourney, in April 2007:
"For Senator Clinton, Democrat of New York, the situation is not so seemingly dire, but any hope she had of Democrats embracing her candidacy as inevitable has been dashed by the rise of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the continued strength of John Edwards of North Carolina, and obvious discomfort in some Democratic quarters of putting another Clinton in the White House."
That's right, as of April 2007, just two months after Obama launched his campaign, whatever inevitability bubble existed had pretty much burst. What would follow was a whole bunch of hand-wringing about how some of those people had declared the primary over way too early.
All despite the fact that there is very little evidence that those people were anything amounting to a chorus.
So to whatever extent the inevitability idea existed, it was gone by, well, right about this point in the race.
Now, it's fair to suggest that perhaps Team Clinton was a little too big for its britches early in the 2008 campaign. But that's generally what campaigns try to do at this point, through fundraising and other things.
And we're sure that's what it looked like from Axelrod's viewpoint. Whatever the case, it's pretty clear he's still hanging on to it.
Bloomberg falls for fake Nancy Reagan report [Hadas Gold, POLITICO, April 10, 2015]
Bloomberg Politics published a report about Nancy Reagan based off fake news site NationalReport.net
Bloomberg Politics published a report about Nancy Reagan based off of fake news site NationalReport.net
The piece, headlined "Nancy Reagan gives her endorsement to... Hillary Clinton," quoted a supposed "Drudge Report" saying that the former first lady told the History Channel series "First Ladies In Their Own Words" that it's time for a female president.
The problem is: Reagan never said such a thing in the series. The report seems to have come from NationalReport.net, a spoof news site that has tricked many a politician and news organization in the past. The piece was then posted to a website called DrudgeReport.com.co, which doesn't seem to be connected to the actual Drudge Report.
The piece, which was published just before 5 p.m. on Friday, was deleted within minutes.
We've reached out to a Bloomberg spokesperson for comment and will update here accordingly.


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