"As Clinton’s Lead Grows, Voter Q&A’s Shrink"

NY Times:

AMES, Iowa – As Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered her stump speech at a rally here on Monday night, Luke Gran stood among the throngs with his hand thrust in the air, eager for Mrs. Clinton to call on him to ask a question.

Mrs. Clinton never did. Nor did she take any questions from average voters at her four other events Monday. Nor has she, with a few exceptions, since Labor Day.

A review of Mrs. Clinton’s daily campaign schedules during the last five weeks says a great deal about her candidacy right now: She has mostly delivered speeches, attended candidate debates, forums, and fund-raisers, and headlined rallies. As Adam Nagourney points out in a story in The Times today, she is running a classic front-runner campaign, holding fewer unpredictable events where voters can lob bombshells at her – even though such events that were once a staple of her schedule, and are still common for rivals like Barack Obama and John Edwards.

During Labor Day week, according to her schedules, she held rallies with her husband, Bill Clinton, in Iowa and New Hampshire; gave two speeches about senior citizen issues; spoke at the New Jersey Democratic convention; attended a rally on ground zero issues; and went to fund-raisers. Through the rest of September and early October, she attended debates and forums on Hispanic, African-American, and other issues; delivered a speech to the NAACP; unveiled policy on health care, science, urban issues, and the economy; headlined a series of fund-raisers, and held more rallies and functions.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, does face questions and scrutiny at the debates, and she does grant interviews with individual reporters – appearing on the five morning talk shows one Sunday in September, for instance, and speaking to The New York Times (among others) about her plans for health insurance and scientific research.

There have been a few question-and-answer sessions with voters, but hardly as many as she once held or as many as her Democratic and Republican rivals still hold. On Sunday, without much notice to the media, her “Organizing for Change” events in Iowa were turned into Q&As, raising questions among reporters about whether recent scrutiny of her front-runner strategy had led her to interact more directly with voters.

These free-wheeling town hall meetings or press conferences – where curve balls can be common, and mistakes more often can be made – now seem like a rarity as the Clinton campaign savors and protects her lead in national opinion polls. She will take questions here and there that reporters toss her, but she has not held a full-blown news conference since January.

While many voters who attend Clinton rallies appear fond of her and hardly seem ready to pounce, some voters – and supporters of her rivals – will probably turn more aggressive as the nomination fight intensifies, raising the likelihood that Mrs. Clinton could face hostile challenges from an audience member.

The lack of dialogue is distressing to voters like Mr. Gran, a senior at Iowa State University, and his friend and classmate Adam Faircloth, who came to the Ames rally here together.

“I could’ve just watched her speech on YouTube – what’s the point of coming to Iowa and giving the same speech over and over without taking questions from real people?” Mr. Gran said.

“I believe in a public conversation where politicians actually engage with the public,” he continued, bringing to memory Mrs. Clinton’s promise, earlier in the campaign, to have “a conversation” with Americans about the future of the country. (At that same, she tweaked President Bush by saying that conversation had become “a little one-sided.”)

For the record, Mr. Gran said he was an undecided voter who was drawn most to Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama, as well as Republican candidate Ron Paul.

While Mr. Gran said he wanted to offer a perfectly straightforward question about the environment, Mrs. Clinton did face the perils of unpredictable questioning on Sunday.

At one of her events, she got into a sparring match with an Iowa man in the audience over Iran, and at one point accused him of being a plant for a rival campaign, according to videotape of the encounter. To some ears she sounded a little too hot, like someone who sees antagonists a bit too easily. When the man took offense and said he was not a plant – indeed, he had attended an Obama rally on Friday and spoke of Iowa as a “reality check” in the presidential process – Mrs. Clinton apologized to him.

It brought to mind her edgy encounter in Las Vegas in August when an audience member (and, it turned out later, conservative Clinton critic) accused her of trying to foist socialized medicine on America. Under the gun, Mrs. Clinton was pointed and quick in defending herself – though she was also rather curt. At one point she said that if the questioner was “interested in being educated instead of being rhetorical,” she could put him in touch with her staff.

It should be noted that Mrs. Clinton at least engaged the Vegas critic and the Iowan on Sunday, unlike some candidates who just cut off hostile questions altogether. I saw John McCain at an immigration event in New York City last year where he responded to a tendentious question from the audience by saying, “No – next question.”

But, as Mr. Nagourney concluded in his piece today, her front-runner strategy will increasingly be put to the test – as will the patience of Iowa and New Hampshire voters who still want candidates to answer their questions.