If Clinton decides to run for President, she’ll need to adopt a more open approach. Illustration by Stanley Chow

Since stepping down as Secretary of State, fifteen months ago, Hillary Clinton has kept a calculated distance from the press and the public. She has been working on a memoir about her years at the State Department, “Hard Choices,” to be published in early June; making occasional speeches, often for a fee said to exceed two hundred thousand dollars; and talking with close advisers about a possible second Presidential run. Despite the absence of a story, the media can’t stop discussing her. The mainstream press recycles talking points concerning her hypothetical campaign while casting about desperately for something new: Will Chelsea’s pregnancy and the prospect of becoming a grandmother mean that Clinton will be less likely to run? Would she support Marjorie Margolies, the Democrat vying to represent Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth Congressional District, who also happens to be Chelsea’s mother-in-law? (She did, but Margolies lost.) When the Washington Post asked eleven Democratic activists in Iowa which of four prominent Democrats they would invite to a dinner party, why did only one choose her?

Meanwhile, Clinton’s old nemesis the “vast right-wing conspiracy” has begun declaring her not only politically but also clinically moribund. “Whispers are persisting, whispers,” Rush Limbaugh said, in anything but a whisper, several months ago on his radio program. “There’s a whisper campaign, folks, that Mrs. Clinton is sick, that she will not run for the Presidency because she is sick.” The Drudge Report contributed a picture of a wan-looking Clinton above the caption “Is she sick?” The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, added, “Whispers persist that Hillary won’t run: Health may be worse than disclosed.” A hard-right blogger, Robert Morrow, wrote that he was “ninety-five per cent sure” that “Hillary Clinton probably has brain cancer” and would not run in 2016. In mid-May, Karl Rove, who learned his trade under Donald Segretti, a dirty-tricks master in the Nixon camp, mentioned a fall Clinton took in December, 2012, which eventually led to a blood clot. He asked why she had emerged from the hospital after thirty days—it was actually just three—“wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury.”

Then Monica Lewinsky reappeared. After ten years of silence, she described in Vanity Fair the indignities she has suffered since her sexual encounters with Bill Clinton, and her belief that Hillary Clinton unfairly maligned her at the time, calling her a “narcissistic loony-toon.” Lynne Cheney, the wife of the former Vice-President, promptly appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s program to speculate whether “this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way.” She wondered if Hillary had somehow persuaded Lewinsky to tell her side of the escapade for the first time. Fox News commentators relished the thought. Eric Bolling said, “Now, the theory that I’m hearing is to provide sympathy for Hillary, just remind everyone that Bill Clinton was a jerk.”

Like so many mad theories that have swirled around Clinton over the years, it was enough to fuel more speculation and to highlight her famously defensive relationship with the press. From her first days in Washington, she adopted a bunker mentality. (Friends and colleagues of Clinton’s often told me that they needed clearance from her spokesman before they could talk to me.) But if she wants to be President she may have to find a new strategy for getting herself across the battlefield.

In the years since Clinton’s Presidential campaign, in 2008, the media has become more polarized, less thoughtful, and faster paced. Conservatives seem to be of two minds about how best to take her on this time. Newt Gingrich said that he was offended by Rove’s remarks. Lindsey Graham, who has consistently criticized Clinton for what he sees as her negligence over security at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for the deadly attack there in 2012, announced that he had “no reason” to think that she “has a health problem that would disqualify her.” In an interview on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace, who worked with Rove on George W. Bush’s 2004 reëlection campaign and then served as the White House communications director, said that Rove was “off the wall” and “had some of the facts wrong,” although she noted that “this was a deliberate strategy on his part to raise her health as an issue . . . ahead of the next campaign.”

I met with Matthew Continetti, the co-founder and editor of the online Washington Free Beacon, which presents itself as an enlightened addition to the right-wing press. Continetti, who is thirty-two, dresses like an older man, in sombre dark suits, plain shirts, modest ties, and frameless glasses. His first job after college was as an intern for William Kristol’s neoconservative publication The Weekly Standard. He was subsequently hired, and he stayed for eight and a half years in all. In 2012, Continetti married Kristol’s daughter, Anne; on their first date night as new parents they attended the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. Kristol sits on the four-member board of the Center for American Freedom, a conservative group that funds the Free Beacon. (The center does not disclose the names of its donors.) Its chairman is Michael Goldfarb, who was an aide to Sarah Palin and has worked as a communications strategist for the Koch brothers.

Continetti’s politics aren’t always predictable. In an article in The Weekly Standard, he criticized as “nonsense” some of Glenn Beck’s musings, such as his “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” on which Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson rank higher than Hitler and Pol Pot. “Not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly,” Continetti wrote. And he has defended the safety net provided by Social Security and Medicare. “It is wishful thinking that they could ever be junked,” he told me in an e-mail. “The best response, then, is to stop fighting the New Deal and try to finance it in a way that does not bankrupt the country.” In his first book, “The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine,” published in 2006, he criticized the undue influence of money on congressional Republicans. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, he wrote, “relied on paid lobbyists to get bills passed, not the other way around.” Three years later, he published “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star,” which he describes in the introduction as “a book about how the feral beast hunted down its prey.”

Continetti launched the Free Beacon, in February, 2012, as a nonprofit enterprise. Conservatives may be divided on some issues, but they remain united by indignation at having been marginalized by the mainstream media. For the Free Beacon’s launch, Continetti wrote a manifesto, “Combat Journalism,” in which he asserted that there weren’t enough conservative journalists to “nullify or even sublimate the loud, constant, coherent progressive roar of: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC; the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and others; the left blogosphere, Hollywood, and practically every magazine editor in the country.” The only option was to respond in kind: “Scrutinize the left’s claims with the same adversarial techniques that the left uses to cover the right. Don’t back down from confrontation. Stick to the facts and avoid the cul-de-sac of conspiracy theory.”