The Hillary Camp's Rationale for Staying Quiet
Mar 6, 2015 6:29 AM EST
Hillary Clinton won’t be presiding over a soul-searching press conference or sitting down for a come-clean interview about her use of a private email address any time soon — at least if everything goes according to her team’s plan.
The former secretary of state and her advisers have decided to adopt a time-tested Clintonian approach: take a concrete step to ease the pressure, then wait out the storm, according to three sources with knowledge of her team’s approach.
Their theory is that her late Wednesday tweet asking the State Department to release the 55,000 pages of emails she provided to the agency would start to calm the media and political tempest, while giving her spokesman an easy answer to many journalists’ questions: ask State.
"It makes sense to settle in a little bit … people have very short memories."
Chris Lehane, Democratic strategist
Clinton and her team are aware that her tactics will only hold out for so long and that she’ll eventually have to answer questions about her e-mail practices, but she and her advisers are aiming to delay that moment, ideally until she formally announces she’s running for president. At that point, they hope, the controversy will have subsided to the point where her campaign launch will be a much bigger headline than her response to a month-old scandal. An added benefit to the approach: the potential for Republicans to overreach and overreact while Clinton stays silent.
Her Rose Garden tactics, time-tested as they are, pose substantial risk. The era is different than when last they were deployed. With Congressional committees probing and the constant stoking of Twitter, the furor may not be fully extinguished by simply sitting on it. Especially with new revelations—on her emails, the Clinton Foundation or something else—there's a danger she will be faced with questions so pressing they demand immediate answers or risk derailing her presidential ambitions.
more...
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-06/the-hillary-camp-s-rationale-for-staying-quiet
= new reply since forum marked as read
