How Clinton chooses to deal with the Sanders phenomenon will have a greater impact on public opinion than whether she gives regular media interviews. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BECKER / AP

Anyone who has followed Hillary Clinton’s career knows that she regards encounters with political reporters with about the same level of enthusiasm that most people regard dental appointments. “Look, she hates you. Period,” one Clinton campaign veteran told Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman (who has since moved to the Times) last year. “That’s never going to change.”

Fair enough. After all the horrible things that have been written and said over the years about the former First Lady and Secretary of State, and about her family, it would be surprising if she didn’t dislike the media. But, as Ronald Reagan’s handlers discovered many years ago, the problem with giving journalists the slip, which Clinton has been doing with evident enthusiasm in the early weeks of her Democratic primary campaign, is that eventually this avoidance strategy becomes the story. So, just as Michael Deaver, Larry Speakes, et al._ _prevailed on the Gipper to do the occasional press conference in an effort to keep the jackals at bay, Clinton’s communications advisers evidently persuaded her to sit down with CNN’s Brianna Keilar for an interview that was advertised as the first of many media interactions to come.

If the Clinton campaign thought that she would be treated more softly by Keilar than by one of the network’s more well-known names—Wolf Blitzer or Jake Tapper, say—it was disappointed. Keilar peppered Clinton with questions about the private e-mail server she used as Secretary of State, polls showing that many American distrust her, and the big crowds that her opponent Bernie Sanders is attracting. Then, when Tapper asked Keilar about the interview, Keilar criticized the answers Clinton gave her, saying, “I did not hear a more open or transparent Hillary Clinton.”

Keilar’s raspberry wasn’t the only one blown in Clinton’s direction. She “looked and sounded cagey and defensive, when her apparent goal is to inspire,” Lloyd Grove, an editor-at-large for the Daily Beast, wrote, adding, “The candidate was, by turns, self-justifying and pugnacious, and occasionally just plain inauthentic.”

Clinton certainly didn’t sound very convincing at times, especially when she sought to blame Republicans for whipping up concerns about her deleted e-mails and other matters. Given that she didn’t have anything new to announce, it was perhaps surprising that the campaign chose to put her out there now. Why not wait until next week, when she is due to give a speech laying out some economic proposals? As Clinton showed when she steered a question from Keilar about Donald Trump toward the Republican Party’s position on immigration, she’s much more comfortable and persuasive when talking about policy issues.

On the positive side, Clinton avoided making any major gaffes, which was probably her primary goal. In today’s always-on media climate, attacks and mistakes dominate the news cycle, and all campaigns know this. If a campaign can supply the former and avoid the latter, it is doing fine. Failure to abide by this maxim leads into Trump territory, where his obnoxious remarks about Mexicans are currently doing serious damage to his business empire. (David Remnick has more on Trump’s campaign.)

In any case, forging a working relationship with the national media is just one of two immediate challenges facing Clinton. The other—what to do about the rise of Bernie Sanders—is far more important. Earlier this week, in a front-page piece in the Times, the Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential campaign, was quoted as saying about Clinton, “Certainly she could lose Iowa.”

Even if this happened, Trippi added, Clinton would probably go on to win the nomination. That’s true. But just a few weeks ago, the very idea of Sanders winning the Iowa primary would have seemed far-fetched. Now, perceptions are changing. In an interview with Politico (for a piece headlined “The socialist surge”), Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, compared Sanders to Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, two liberals who, in 1968 and 1972, picked up a lot of support in the early primary states and derailed establishment favorites.

It’s far too early to mention Hillary Clinton in the same breath as Lyndon B. Johnson or Ed Muskie, but how she chooses to deal with the Sanders phenomenon will have a greater impact on public opinion than whether she gives regular media interviews. So far, she has largely adopted a watching brief. A Clinton adviser admitted to the Times that the campaign had underestimated Sanders’ appeal in Iowa, but added, “It’s too early to change strategy because no one knows if Sanders will be able to hold on to these voters in the months ahead.”

Most likely, he will hold on to a good number of them.

There are two reasons Sanders is doing so well. Firstly, he’s perceived as an outsider, and he’s tapping into a progressive movement that has little faith in the Democratic Party establishment. Secondly, the primary timetable favors him. On a national basis, according to a recent CNN/O.R.C. poll of likely Democratic voters, Clinton still has a huge lead over Sanders: fifty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. (In fact, the poll found that Sanders was in third place, behind Vice President Biden, who got sixteen per cent despite not having entered the race.) It so happens, though, that Iowa and New Hampshire both contain many white, college-educated liberals who are sympathetic to the Vermont senator’s views. Sanders is polling less well among other elements of the Democratic coalition, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics, who won’t come out in force until the primary contest moves to states like South Carolina.

Clearly, Clinton can’t do anything about the electoral calendar. Can she successfully counter Sanders’s political message in the early primary states? Over the next few weeks, as she starts rolling out her campaign proposals, we should get some indication. After that, she is planning on taking a vacation. The schedule for televised Democratic debates, of which there will be half a dozen, has yet to be set, and voting day in Iowa is still almost seven months away. But the race is now on.