In the final push before today’s potentially decisive votes in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont, Bill Clinton is a supersurrogate campaigning like a candidate. On Sunday he stumped at eight different events across the state of Texas, including three unscheduled appearances at Houston-area church services. And yet the former president maintains that he is “not even a candidate. I’m just a free campaign aide,” he says. And a tireless one at that.
While campaigning for his wife, Clinton has logged thousands of miles both on the ground and in the air, stumped with various political notables, from former astronaut and Ohio senator John Glenn to New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez. He has campaigned in blue-collar coal towns like Athens and largely Hispanic communities in Houston. He has signed countless copies of his memoir “My Life” and shaken even more hands.
The one thing Clinton hasn’t done in weeks is field a single question from a journalist.
At events across Ohio and Texas, reporters are herded into makeshift paddocks, sometimes blocked off with traffic tape and safety cones, other times with metal gates. Matt McKenna, Clinton’s traveling press secretary, jokingly refers to this area as “the cage.”
It’s not unusual for the press to be sequestered at campaign events. Journalists need space to work, and television crews can’t afford to have their equipment jostled by the crowd. But reporters venture outside the Clinton “cage” at their peril.
At a rally in New Philadelphia, Ohio, on Friday, a reporter who needed to use the restroom was told she had to be escorted by a member of the Hillary Clinton advance team. Earlier last week, when the same reporter moved outside the press area to interview audience members, she was deemed dangerously close to Clinton’s rope line and promptly asked to escort herself back to the press riser.
These days the rope line is the last place McKenna and campaign staffers want to see a journalist. One explanation: the Clintons have “a very long memory” and are withholding access as a means of punishing news outlets for printing or broadcasting unflattering content. After MSNBC correspondent David Shuster questioned whether the Clintons had “pimped out” their daughter Chelsea, for example, McKenna says Clinton canceled an exclusive interview with the network. But in the day-to-day of the campaign trail, Clinton’s handlers seem less concerned with punishing offending journalists and more worried about what the former president might say to them. In late January one of Clinton’s advisers told NEWSWEEK, “He’s hard to control.”
“Every reporter wants to be the next one [Clinton] goes off on,” says McKenna, alluding to a series of now infamous incidents in which the former president made headlines for scolding journalists. Clinton’s outbursts—paired with racially charged comments in which he compared Barack Obama’s campaign to that of Jesse Jackson in late January—transformed Clinton’s role in his wife’s campaign from asset to liability. The Clinton campaign knew it needed to do some damage control—quick.
In the past few weeks Bill Clinton’s campaigning has been largely defined by the old adage “No news is good news.” Apart from a few events in Dallas and Houston last week, Clinton has eschewed rallies in major cities and metro areas accessible to the national media. Instead he stays off the beaten path, stumping in more obscure towns, like New Philadelphia and Abilene, Texas (both of which are—much to the chagrin of his unofficial traveling press corps—inconvenient to major commercial airports). McKenna maintains that Clinton’s withdrawal from the limelight was not a matter of strategy. The former president is keenly aware that “his job is to be a surrogate and an advocate for his wife,” and not to steal the show with his own antics. As for Clinton’s refusal to talk to the press, McKenna will say only that the statesman does not feel as though he has anything relevant to say to journalists, who are often more caught up in the horse race than the issues.
“He’s here to talk to these folks,” said McKenna, motioning to a crowd at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, yesterday. “He’s here to talk to people who have real questions that matter to real people.”
McKenna also argues that Clinton’s supersurrogate role does not—and should not—require him to chat up reporters.
“He’s no different from Michelle Obama or Cindy McCain,” says McKenna. “…[Clinton] is not a candidate. He’s here to make the case to voters in Ohio and Texas to support his wife. He’s obviously more than capable of taking tough questions—he takes the toughest questions from voters who want to know what his wife is going to do about issues like health care.”
And when it comes to touting his wife’s message to voters—whether health-care-related or otherwise—Clinton has been remarkably disciplined. He rarely veers off message. The New York Times recently described him as “muzzled” and straining on a “short leash.”
But even after dialing back, Clinton’s remarks continue to stir crowds. He draws particularly thunderous applause when discussing his wife’s plan for universal health coverage. In stump speech after stump speech, Clinton asks for a show of hands from those who know someone without health care. When the majority of hands go up, Clinton pauses, looks around the room in disgust, and responds, “This is the only rich country in the world where this question could be answered in that way.” The audience eats it up. Clinton often adds that, unlike Barack Obama, his wife is as indignant as they are.
Still, Clinton is Clinton. Sometimes he just can’t help himself. On the subject of Obama’s preparedness for the White House, the former president scoffs that “there has been a determined effort to degrade experience in this election, to kind of make fun of it.” If the past is so irrelevant, Clinton asks rhetorically, “why don’t we just stop teaching history in schools?” These shots are relatively rare, though. He typically avoids mentioning Obama by name, referring to him simply as “my wife’s opponent,” and concedes that “most like [Obama and Clinton] both.”
With the polls tightening in Ohio and Texas, Clinton stepped up the pace. By late Monday his chartered jet had shuttled him between seven different events up and down the state of Texas, from Corpus Christi to Laredo to El Paso. Not bad for a free campaign aide.
