Political reporters covering Hillary Clinton will have to find something new to whine about: Clinton spoke to reporters on her campaign plane on Sunday, amounting to a—gasp—press conference. Clinton answered very important questions about whether her cough will feed conspiracy theories that her health is secretly awful (as if anything could deter these people) and about her electoral prospects (news flash: she’s “not taking anything for granted”), but also got the chance to talk a little substance about, for instance, closing Guantanamo:
“It’s been a goal of President Obama from the very beginning of his administration, and it should remain the goal of the next president. Guantanamo Bay, as I think we all recognize, became a symbol of a lot of the problems that were started under the Bush administration and which have not served us well in terms of relations around the world. So, I would like to see it closed.”
Meanwhile, Time’s Zeke Miller and the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin took to Twitter to remind us all what good reason Clinton has to hate reporters. Miller tweeted a snippet of a pool report describing Clinton as having a “big scarcastic smile on her face” as she welcomed reporters on the plane. (There's video. It wasn’t all that sarcastic. Or presumably scarcastic either.) But Martin wins the prize for this one:
Right. As many people responding on Twitter pointed out, she’s hanging out with Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, and Jimmy Buffett in that picture! That’s … maybe a little more central to what’s going on with her there than is the absence of press? How telling is it about Jonathan Martin’s mindset that he looks at that picture and thinks “People like me aren’t there! That’s what’s noteworthy about this!”
In short, just because Clinton more or less gave the reporters who follow her around the specific form of access and opportunity to ask her questions they’d been demanding, don’t look for them to stop taking the cheapest shots they can come up with.
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