Fourth Estate Your Normal Rules Don’t Apply to Hillary Clinton She’s treating the media as if she were already president.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

What the press still fails to appreciate about Hillary Clinton is that she’s not running for president, she’s running as president, and all the usual rules about when and how she should speak don’t apply to her. In her mind—and who can blame her?—she’s the incumbent, this is a reelection campaign, and she occupies a place miles above the liquescent bogs of petty politics into which reporters would dunk her. A president is better seen than heard, she believes, hence her extended “listening tour.”

“The words of the president have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately,” as President Calvin Coolidge once put it.


The press isn’t buying that, of course, so every time Clinton dons her media-deflecting shroud in public, reporters attempt to tear it off, like Tuesday in Cedar Falls, Iowa. After 28 days of shaking off reporters’ questions like a fussy major-league pitcher, and after answering only 13 queries since announcing her candidacy, Clinton finally fielded a few at a forum and volleyed in a way guaranteed to make almost no news.

When not running for president, a politician can do almost any indiscriminate thing without suffering embarrassment or damage. President Barack Obama proved that yesterday by launching his own Twitter account, @POTUS. Obama presented himself as the anti-Coolidge, promptly engaging in a little Twitter towel-snapping with Bill Clinton, our former president. By virtue of their media leverage, Clinton and Obama can set the terms of engagement—or disengagement, if you will—and burn endless news cycles however they wish.

There’s nothing new about politicians creating busy work for journalists. As my friend the media historian David Greenberg notes in his biography of Coolidge, Silent Cal actually knew how to speak English and met routinely with reporters to help them fill their notebooks. Coolidge required reporters to submit their questions in writing, picked which questions to answer, and stipulated that they attribute his comments to “a White House spokesman.” He also availed himself to new media to shape the news, Greenberg writes. He gave the first nationwide inaugural address via radio and appeared in such short films as this folksy visit to his Vermont summer home, “ Visitin’ ’Round at Coolidge Corners.”

Coolidge took abuse from journalists for his media dabbling and news management, with such writers as Sherwin Cook complaining, “Cultured Americans wince at the thought of their president putting on a smock frock to pose while pitching hay and milking a bossy.” Scripps-Howard reporter Ludwell Denny called the Coolidge press conference “a vicious institution in American life” and called for their abolishment. But the media massages Coolidge dispensed to the press worked to his advantage, Greenberg concludes.

The path from Coolidge to Obama is shorter than you might think. Dan Pfeiffer, former Obama senior adviser (strategy and communications), took to Backchannel yesterday to explain the president’s Twitter entrance. Boasting about Obama’s other communication “firsts”—online news interview, late-night comedy interview, daytime talk interview, et al.—Pfeiffer explains that the president needs to go “where the conversation is happening.” Pfeiffer may be right—to make a media impact, a president need only be present, which may also mean we can count on him Snapchatting and maybe even Tindering before his term expires. But Pfeiffer says no Twitter breakthrough will be forthcoming until the president uses his account to engage with citizens, responding to questions as well as suggestions and complaints. “Anything that breaks down barriers and brings the public and politicians together is a good thing,” Pfeiffer writes, neglecting to mention that such barrier-breaking—be it newsreels, Twitter or radio addresses—eliminates journalists from the communications feed. That just happens to be the icing on the new media cake.

Catapulting the presidential message over the heads of journalists to the public has been a White House desire for decades, with Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy forever devising new ways to route their message around the press. Still, no president has ever fabricated his own media to greater effect than Franklin Roosevelt, whose “ Fireside Chats” drew radio audiences in the tens of millions. In his paper, “The Lion and the Lamb: De-Mythologizing Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats,” scholar Elvin T. Lim explains how Roosevelt upended the principal mode of presidential rhetoric—the public speech on a train platform or town hall podium—with his radio talks. Although he gave only 27 of them, the impact was as if he gave 2,700. The chats were a deliberate slap at the newspapers, which Roosevelt believed should publish only the “facts” but insisted on running anti-Roosevelt “interpretation” in their news coverage, columns, and editorials.

Although the Fireside Chats are remembered as informal chinwagging by the president, Lim points out that they had more in common with the hell-raising style of oration associated with William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette and even Father Charles Coughlin, and addressed themselves mostly to “urgent problems of government and the economy.” Largely avoiding good news, the chats were about hardship and reality, and Roosevelt availed himself of such name-calling as “calamity-howling executive,” “war millionaires,” “trouble breeders,” “sunshine patriot,” “typewriter strategists,” “petty chiselers,” Hitler’s “dupes among us” and more in his chats to denigrate his foes and delight his supporters. (In addition to the chats, he also gave 83 radio addresses and 473 public addresses.)

In other words, in style and substance, FDR presaged the entire genre of conservative radio now led by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, not to mention Ronald Reagan’s often aggressive approach.

Had the White House not worked out so well for Roosevelt, he could have fallen back on a journalistic career. The former editor in chief of the Harvard Crimson during his college days, he figured (not so fancifully) that he could do the press corps job better than they. According to Betty Houchin Winfield’s indispensable book, FDR and the News Media, in January 1940 Roosevelt signed a secret contract with Collier’s magazine to serve as a contributing editor filing a minimum of 26 articles a year should he decide to leave government. Hillary Clinton, who clearly thinks she knows the journalistic trade better than most who practice it (and might be right!), could similarly use what she’s learned to cash in on the press biz or a firesiding talk show once she leaves public life. But could she afford the pay cut?

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FDR also despised the “prophets of evil” and “hair-splitters.” Send FDR-style epithets to [email protected] . Should I refashion my Twitter feed as a Fireside Chat? My RSS feed as Campobello? My email alerts as Fala?