The tour highlights both her strengths and weaknesses for a potential 2016 run. Clinton's book tour: What we learned

From endless coverage of “dead broke” to flagging sales of her new book, Hillary Clinton has had a rough couple of weeks.

But Clinton has nevertheless accomplished much of what she set out to do with the rollout of “Hard Choices,” her memoir of her time as secretary of state. She flogged the book to big crowds, though her publisher still needs to sell several hundred thousand more copies to cover her multimillion-dollar advance. She showed she could endure the media meat grinder. She demonstrated that her record as secretary of state can withstand tough scrutiny.


And Clinton put to rest any lingering doubts about her stamina, sitting through what her aides tallied at more than 25 hours of interviews and running nonstop for weeks — a gantlet that no other potential 2016 candidate can claim to have withstood.

At the same time, the book tour has highlighted both strengths and weaknesses for Clinton ahead of a potential 2016 campaign.

( PHOTOS: Hillary Clinton starts her book tour)

Here are POLITICO’s takeaways from the first three weeks of the “Hard Choices” tour.

Coming back to earth is hard

There’s been a conflation of different issues involving Clinton — her wealth, and the rarefied world she inhabits. They aren’t the same thing. Plenty of rich people manage to relate to working-class voters. But the fact that Clinton’s lifestyle has been hermetically sealed since she went to the State Department is something she’ll have to contend with.

She spent four years flying on a government plane, traveling constantly. Since she left Foggy Bottom, her life has largely been a whirlwind of speeches that have included travel on private jets and the attendance of large security details.

The book tour has put her in front of thousands of people but can’t be mistaken for a listening tour: Signings have not been forums for active, engaged dialogue with voters.

How Clinton explains her family’s immense wealth (and it is immense) and how she takes to engaging with everyday people remain to be seen.

‘Radical candor’ versus the canned variety

When CNN hosted a town hall with Clinton last month, interviewer Christiane Amanpour asked her about marijuana. Clinton said she was “committing radical candor” in her answer, a reference to the newfound freedom she said she was enjoying. (Clinton said it should be available medicinally for people with “extreme conditions” and that she wants to “wait and see” the evidence in states legalizing it for recreational use before taking a position.)

( PHOTOS: Hillary Clinton’s 50 influentials)

It’s true that Clinton has been blunt on some topics. She acknowledged she has “evolved” on gay marriage, and stated in her book that she got it “wrong” in her vote on the Iraq War, a vote that helped cost her the 2008 presidential nomination.

But that declaration about “evolving” came only after a contentious interview with NPR host Terry Gross, whose program is a favorite of liberal voters who have genuine questions about how she arrived at her new position. And she has said relatively little about why she wouldn’t say she was “wrong” in 2008 about Iraq. She wrote in the book that sometimes it’s seen as a sign of weakness to admit a mistake in politics. But in Aspen, Colorado, this week, she described herself as reluctant to call it a “mistake” while there were still U.S. troops fighting in Iraq.

Both cases show Clinton is willing to pull back the curtain only so far. That guardedness can be tricky at a time when authenticity matters more than ever for politicians and faux authenticity isn’t enough. The interviews gave her a chance to test her comfort zone, but she’ll get pushed harder in the future.

Clinton has a very thin infrastructure …

For all the talk about how 2016 will have to be different from 2008 in terms of staffing and advisers, Clinton is still subsisting on a tiny infrastructure. The press team is small, and she has few paid advisers. She outsourced the work of managing surrogates during the book tour to longtime allies. But she has no polling operation to test what she’s saying and no raft of campaign advisers instructing her answers.

Clinton is trying to delay being treated like a candidate as long as possible, and hiring people would only trigger new scrutiny. And the book tour was a large undertaking to go through with a relatively small team. That can only last for so long.

… but it’s clear that Abedin is in charge

One recurring question reporters and donors have had is whether Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime aide, has resumed her central spot in Clinton’s orbit after the messiness surrounding her husband, Anthony Weiner, during the 2013 mayoral race.

( POLITICO Magazine PHOTOS: Joe & Hill)

The book tour provided a very clear answer: yes. Abedin is, unequivocally, running the vast majority of the Clinton operation that involves her personal staff.

She was in charge at every book signing event, keeping things moving at a Costco in Pentagon City, directing staffers at a signing in Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Other Clinton aides on hand were deeply deferential to her. And she’s coordinating Clinton’s upcoming political appearances for Democrats in the midterms.

The 1990s live on …

Some of the younger voters who Clinton will need to appeal to weren’t born when her husband was first elected president. They have no context for or memory of the searing battles of the 1990s Clinton White House.

But Hillary Clinton remembers very clearly, and she is still raw over the partisan wars that hindered her husband’s legacy and left the couple with millions of dollars in legal debt.

Her comment about being “dead broke” came from a place of frustration over the legal bills and their cause. So does a lot of her lingering distaste for a national press corps, which savaged her husband during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Her anger in both cases, her allies argue, is justified. But voters who didn’t live through that decade have no context with which to understand it. In the 1990s, it was breathtaking for Democrats that a sitting president had to establish a legal defense fund for himself, and there was instant sympathy evoked whenever the Clintons talked about being persecuted by political rivals. Both Clintons remain angry that their friends and donors ended up spending gobs of money, and Hillary Clinton hated the notion that they had millions of dollars’ worth of debt.

The problem for Clinton is that, 20 years later, that prism may still exist strongly for her, but for the public it has faded from view.

… and so does 2008

Within a week of Clinton’s book landing, some Obama 2008 senior aides groused to POLITICO that she had taken liberties in how she characterized their attempt to get her to criticize Sarah Palin in 2008.

In Clinton’s telling, they wanted her to criticize Palin for, essentially, being a high-profile woman; in their telling, they asked the same thing from Clinton that they would have asked from any male surrogate.

A few days later, a Washington Post story quoted three people identified as Obama advisers who were bluntly critical of how she has handled discussions of her wealth.

It will always be possible to find Obama veterans willing to say bad things about Clinton, and a lot of staffers on both sides still have grudges from 2008. But motive matters. And at least some of the teeth gnashing can probably be attributed to people who will always have an ax to grind and are having difficulty watching Clinton on a path to eclipse the history-making president — as opposed to objective worries about the former secretary of state.

She’s not pushing a message

Republicans have made clear the past few months they’re trying out a variety of attacks on Clinton, trying to see what sticks. But after spending hours preparing for questions, according to people familiar with the briefings, she went into the book tour interviews without a message of her own that she wanted to push.

That left her playing defense on everything from her wealth to her age to Monica Lewinsky.

Without coming to the interviews armed with a “why” for her potential presidential candidacy, Clinton’s interviews were all about her. But voters don’t much want to hear candidates talk about themselves at length, especially with many of them facing their own struggles thanks to a still-slumping economy.

The press seized on Clinton’s remarks about her wealth, and sources close to Clinton said the former secretary was bothered by the coverage. They said Clinton felt her supporters were slow to come to her defense against Republicans pushing a critique of her as “out of touch,” a frame her allies seemed surprised to see her defined by.

Even if Clinton isn’t ready to talk policy specifics, she can reiterate the values and issues she stands for. Some of her supporters and allies started to do that in the second week of her book tour, but it needs to come out of her own mouth.

Still, the interviews weren’t a lost cause

The majority of attention has been paid to Clinton’s gaffes.

Her allies argue she still handled most questions quite well. Karl Rove had stoked questions about Clinton’s health, but questions about her health, which Karl Rove stoked ahead of the book release, mostly vanished after Clinton made a well-delivered joke about the TV show “The Golden Girls” to Diane Sawyer.

It is also notable that the book, after all the interviews and coverage, wasn’t picked apart in any significant way. She’s faced some criticism of her explanation of the Benghazi attacks, but that, too, has barely been discussed since her Fox News interview with Bret Baier and Greta Van Susteren. If her critics hoped to discredit her self-drafted version of her record, they barely laid a glove on the book’s contents.

The Clinton-Clinton dynamic remains for the media

In 2008, Bill Clinton was a constant pain for his wife’s advisers, who felt like they couldn’t control him. So one of Bill Clinton’s first orders of business when his wife became secretary of state was to stay out of her way.

That’s why it caught people’s attention when he defended her during an interview with “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, while Hillary Clinton sat several feet away in the audience.

She’s “not out of touch,” Bill Clinton said, going on to explain that they get out in their Chappaqua, New York, neighborhood and go to the grocery store and “know what’s going on.”

A day later, in a previously unannounced interview with PBS’s Gwen Ifill, Hillary Clinton said her husband was “sweet” but that “I don’t need anybody to defend my record.”

This was basically a husband defending a wife, and it’s easy to read too much into it. But for people who have watched the public interactions between them for more than two decades, it was notable.

Washington is sick of Clinton

If there’s a consensus out of the Acela corridor after the initial phase of the book tour, it’s that the media-political complex is already getting Clinton fatigue. She was urged to be more public over the past 12 months, but now there’s a collective media yawn. Liberal HBO talk-show host Bill Maher urged her to “go away” for a while.

Part of the focus on her wealth has been because it’s a new topic — the Clintons simply weren’t wealthy when they first went to the White House, and the sprawling Clinton Inc. empire that exists now is fodder for examination.

She’s about to disappear, for the most part, to the New York vacation enclave the Hamptons for much of the summer, save for a few additional book and other events. She’ll re-emerge politically in the fall, when she is on the stump around the country.

One open question is how Clinton’s public standing has been affected by the saturation-level coverage the past several weeks. The only public poll taken during the book tour, a Wall Street Journal/NBC survey, suggested her poll numbers have held up.

A lot of this may not matter

If Clinton repeatedly makes clumsy comments about her wealth, it could do lasting damage. Candidates need their voters to be excited about electing them in close races, which presidential races usually are.

But gaffes really resonate when they play into an existing notion voters have about a candidate. That was Mitt Romney’s problem; it’s harder to see it being Clinton’s six months from now, assuming she cleans up her performance. Indeed, Democrats argue the “dead broke” comment is less likely to be part of the vernacular than the impact of Obama taking executive action on immigration or the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, both of which Democrats believe will motivate their voters in the midterms and the next presidential race.

And if the economy strengthens in a big way — the solid July jobs report was cause for optimism — it will sway Clinton’s fortunes a lot more than anything she has said, about her wealth or otherwise, during the book tour.