TAMPA, Fla. — Hillary Clinton was happy to let Donald Trump keep a tight grip on the steering wheel of the election when he seemed, daily, to be careening into oncoming traffic.

But with her opponent apparently stabilizing — a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday showed Trump leading nationally by 2 percentage points — Clinton is trying to seize control of the car again.


Twice in two days, the Democratic presidential nominee sauntered to the back of her new campaign plane to talk to the reporters now traveling with her — and both days she was armed with a topic that would drive the news and needle Trump in an apparent new effort to enter the fray rather than hide from it.

On Monday, it was Russia — Clinton accused Vladimir Putin’s government of tampering with the U.S. election and hinted strongly that he’s putting his finger on the scale for Trump.

On Tuesday, Clinton faced the cameras and outstretched iPhone recorders to deliver one of her most forceful rebukes yet regarding her opponent’s refusal to release his tax returns.

“The scams, the frauds, the questionable relationships — his tax returns tell a story that the American people deserve and need to know,” said Clinton, who upped her dosage of antihistamines to soothe her allergies and her hacking cough . “We’re going to talk about it in one way or another for the next 62 days, because he clearly has something to hide. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we’re getting better guesses.”

If she was grinding her teeth while holding forth with the fourth estate, she did a good job hiding it. “I love having the plane; the plane makes everything so much easier,” she said when she poked her head in the back to say hello before takeoff from Westchester County, New York, to Tampa, Florida. “That’s what we used to do in the State Department all the time — it was just so simple, everybody in one place.”

Clinton told reporters she pays “no attention to polls” and that the campaign is “on a course that we are sticking with. We’re sticking with our strategy.”

But at least part of that strategy appears to have shifted since August, when Clinton felt safer in the cloistered backyards and gilded living rooms of her wealthiest friends — and allies close to the campaign said she was hoping to maintain her lead over Trump and simply “run out the clock” rather than address head-on the latest wrinkles in the overlapping email and Clinton Foundation controversies.

“It was smart to keep a low profile during the period in August when her opponent was damaging himself on a daily basis,” said Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “But he has stabilized, and she could not survive the rest of the campaign in a protective cocoon.”

With 62 days to go, Clinton has no choice but to attempt to drive the news herself. “If you’re not the stick in this kind of fight, then you’re going to be the piñata,” Axelrod added.

On board the new 737 that Clinton is sharing with the press corps, it is communications director Jennifer Palmieri who has been advocating fiercely for Clinton to be that stick.

It was Palmieri, a former White House communications director, who suggested to her boss on Monday that she turn to the press to weigh in on Russia after reading a report in The Washington Post about an intelligence probe into Moscow’s efforts to disrupt the November election results.

Palmieri advised subbing in a reaction to Russia for a planned riff on the state of the economy. Clinton was “gung ho,” aides said.

Palmieri also persuaded Clinton to surprise the eager press with multiple briefings during two days on the campaign trail, when Clinton attended rallies in Ohio, Illinois and Florida. “Jen has convinced me I need to,” Clinton said sheepishly when she came back Tuesday before takeoff to tell reporters herself that she planned to take more questions.

And it is a sign of Palmieri’s growing influence — she is the only campaign official who was in debate prep sessions last week and traveling on the plane with Clinton this week — that the sometimes stubborn candidate relented.

“You need someone on the plane who has a familiarity and stature with the candidate and the strategic sense to make immediate calls because you may not be able to get HQ convened in time to make a decision,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a top aide to Obama.

In 2008, Robert Gibbs played that role for Obama until Axelrod took over. For Clinton, in the heat of the general election, so far it’s Palmieri.

For her part, Clinton seemed more comfortable in the less formal, podiumless setup, standing in the plane aisle with reporters hunched around her. She even encouraged her traveling press secretary, Nick Merrill, to allow “one more” question after he tried to wrap it up.

In two days, Clinton answered more than 45 minutes of questions from the press — which finally allowed her to start fielding questions about events of the day, rather than only on the twin email and foundation controversies.

“You don’t get in a snit and stay on your plane and go home because your security and their security are scuffling over what stairs are put up,” Clinton said, responding to Trump’s comment that he would have withdrawn from the G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, if he had been in Obama’s position on Sunday and had not received the expected red-carpet welcome. “You get off the plane, you get to work and you move on.”

She also criticized Trump for saying that the Federal Reserve had created a “false economy.”

“I’m not going to comment on Trump’s comment other than to say he shouldn’t be trying to talk up or talk down the economy,” Clinton said. “Words have consequences. Words move markets. Words can be misinterpreted. Words can have effects on people’s 401(k)s, their pension fund.” Trump “should not be adding the Fed to his long list of institutions and individuals he is maligning and otherwise attacking.”

Clinton seemed more tense when questioned about the issues that have dogged her campaign. “It doesn’t matter how many times you ask me or how you ask me — these issues will be decided after the election,” Clinton said of her family members’ involvement with the Clinton Foundation if she is elected. “Let’s not pretend there were conflicts, because there were not.”

She abruptly dismissed a question about Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s latest attempt to investigate whether the former secretary of state or any of her aides deleted emails or destroyed any evidence related to her private email server. “No, of course not, I have no concern on either account,” she said.

On Tuesday, as she boarded her plane back to Chappaqua, it was not clear how long the new, more accessible version of Clinton would stick around.

But it seemed as though the longer Trump is able to stay on message and in the right states — on Tuesday he attended a town hall on military and veterans issues in Virginia Beach, Virginia, before heading to North Carolina — the more likely Clinton will have to keep it up.

On Tuesday, as Trump’s campaign released a letter signed by 88 retired military officers backing the Republican nominee, Clinton fired back with an answer revealing of why she could potentially win this election despite her own weaknesses as a candidate. “I have more endorsements from retired flag officers than any Democrat other than an incumbent president ever had,” she said. “I’m doing better than any Democrat.”

But perhaps most telling, she said, “he’s doing worse than any recent Republicans.”

