David Michael Miller
In times past, an incoming Democratic president could count on a warm welcome from the Washington press corps. But Hillary Clinton, who is on track to become the least popular president-elect in modern times, stands to inherit a White House Briefing Room still seething with mistrust and hostility.
Despite frequently bragging that he runs the “most transparent administration in history,” President Barack Obama has operated with an unparalleled level of concealment. Veteran New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger has claimed that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." Jill Abramson, a Times editor under whom Sanger served, once called the Obama years “a benchmark for a new level of secrecy and control.”
Obama has launched more internal leak investigations than all previous administrations combined. Agents have aggressively pressured journalists to reveal their sources, even to the point of threatening prosecution. The administration has also set a record for resisting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. During Obama’s tenure, lawsuits challenging the government’s FOIA operations have risen by 54 percent, and the US has fallen from 20th to 41st place in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
So journalists should be thrilled that this administration is coming to a close. Except they strongly suspect things will get even worse under Clinton. “President Obama is suddenly not looking so bad anymore,” lamented McClatchy Newspapers’ White House correspondent Anita Kumar recently, anticipating the next four to eight years. Kumar says that, under Clinton, “we think there will be less information, [fewer] news conferences, less interaction with the media.”
Hillary Clinton had, by all accounts, an open and engaging disposition in her younger days. But she began developing a bunker mentality in reaction to the scrutiny she received as first lady of Arkansas. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has observed that while Clinton “does have this idealistic public service side...her secretiveness and defensiveness tend to trip [that] up.”
Presidential campaigns provide a window into the future character of an administration, and Clinton’s aloofness has persistently antagonized those who cover her on the trail. An online counter, developed by the Washington Post, at one point tolled an astonishing 275 days between Clinton press conferences. Her arms-length treatment of the media hit a nadir at a Fourth of July parade in 2015. She deigned to allow reporters to walk along with her, but only if they stayed within a comical rope corral that was moved along by staffers. The incident prompted journalist Josh Jordan to tweet, “239 years ago America declared independence. Today Hillary celebrates that by roping off the press like wild animals.”
At times during the campaign, Clinton’s habitual guardedness seemed to jeopardize her prospects for victory over a cartoonishly inept opponent. She professed to have conducted State Department business over a private email server merely for the sake of “convenience.” “I thought it would be easier to carry one device,” she claimed, confusing those of us who, like Ray LaHood, when he served as transportation secretary, manage to keep separate work and personal email accounts on a single phone. Given Clinton’s history, the much more plausible explanation is that she wished to operate outside the media’s FOIA purview.
The email scandal has been terribly damaging. In a June 2016 Fox News poll, a solid majority of respondents agreed that “Hillary Clinton is lying about how her emails were handled while she was secretary of state.” And the late-breaking report that the FBI is examining a newly discovered cache of emails has re-energized a flagging Donald Trump campaign. Though it’s almost certainly too little, too late for Trump, congressional Republicans are promising to hamstring a Clinton White House with email-focused hearings regardless of what the FBI finds.
Clinton’s contempt for the press is most glaringly manifest in her stubborn refusal (as of this writing) to bring journalists into a so-called protective pool, despite having repeatedly promised to do so. Every previous major presidential candidate in the modern era has allowed a team of reporters to “attach” themselves to their campaign entourage. Pathetically, the Clinton camp has used Trump’s denial of protective pool privileges as an excuse for her repudiation, as if Trump has the moral authority to set such standards.
The absence of a protective pool enabled Clinton’s bizarre evasions about being sick at this year’s 9/11 memorial in New York. She simply ditched the press that day. The episode fueled a Trump poll surge, and led famed Democratic operative David Axelrod to quip that pneumonia is treatable, but “what's the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?”
Fear of a Trump victory has likely subdued media complaints about their consistently shabby treatment, and Trump’s antics have provided a constant distraction. But once the Trump threat has officially passed, look for a fed-up press corps to start strongly asserting itself.
Things might get ugly. As Dowd points out, “people tend to get more paranoid in the White House, at the very moment that the whole country affirms them.”
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.
