With former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton losing ground in virtually every poll, it looks like she and her campaign staff have decided that answering a question posed by a long-time reporter is not as important as responding to the same query from an "average voter."
That was apparently the case on Monday evening, when Bloomberg Politics reporter Mark Halperin received no answer from the Democratic presidential candidate when he asked if she had a message for the National Rifle Association.
That incident occurred less than a week after a gunman fatally shot nine people on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.
According to an article by Jon Street -- who is an assistant editor at TheBlaze website -- Clinton ignored Halperin even though he was standing just inches away from the 2016 candidate.
To watch the video referred to in this article, click on this link and scroll down until you see the connection to the file.
“What’s your message to the NRA, Secretary Clinton?” Halperin asked, even though both people were surrounded by other reporters and event attenders.
“But Clinton acted like Halperin wasn’t there, failing to even look at him,” Street stated.
The Bloomberg reporter tried again: “Can I ask you a question about guns, Secretary Clinton?”
Again, he got no answer, so Halperin tried to get a response a third time. “Secretary Clinton, what’s your message to the NRA?” he asked and was ignored again.
“But Halperin wasn’t going to let Clinton avoid answering that easily,” Street noted. “Determined to pry out some sort of response from the presidential candidate, the veteran reporter enlisted the help of a voter who approached Clinton and asked her the exact same question.”
“What’s your message for the NRA?” the voter asked. “I know you’ve been talking about gun control.”
“And just like that, Clinton finally gave a response,” the editor indicated:
Yeah, you know, I just did a town hall about that. My message is not to them or for them. My message is to the American people. It is time that we stood up together for common sense gun safety measures to end the epidemic of gun violence.
And that is going to be an issue that I emphasize in the campaign, and that I'm going to work as hard as I can to get something done in Washington, but it has to come from the bottom up.
When the segment returned to Halperin, the reporter stated: “I tried to ask Hillary Clinton what her message was for the NRA. She wouldn't answer me, so what did I do? I went to the middle lady. What did you do?”
“I asked her the question,” the young woman responded
“How did it work out?” he asked.
“It was great,” the woman replied. “She gave me a great answer, and she interacted with me, and she gave me an answer that I value and I think it makes sense.”
“You won, I won, and Hillary Clinton won,” Halperin stated.
“I like it,” the voter concluded. “It's perfect.”
However, gun control wasn't the only subject discussed in the Bloomberg video segment.
“A normal candidate flips pancakes,” the male narrator began.
“I guess you've probably flipped a pancake in your life,” a woman asked Clinton during a campaign stop.
“Yes, I have,” she responded.
“Not so normal?” the narrator added. “A squadron of Secret Service agents watches her every move.”
“This is normal,” he continued: “Wonking out at a wonky policy forum on early childhood development.”
“You know, the famous word gap study, which is kind of a snapshot study of, you know, people who are better stimulated, talked to and all of that, who then, you know, have heard 30 million more words than a kid from a less-advantaged background.”
“Here's another thing a typical candidate does: Clinton huddled with her staff to come up with a sound bite to make sure her gun message got on the news,” the narrator said. “What's the most obvious way to do that? Mention a certain Republican front-runner.”
“Mister Trump was asked about it and said something like: 'You know, things like that happen in the world;'" Clinton stated, "and governor Bush said: 'Yeah, stuff happens.'”
“No,” she asserted. “That's an admission of defeat and surrender to a problem that is killing” thousands of Americans every week.
The narrator continued: “But the size of her entourage and the unusually controlled formality of Clinton's interactions with voters makes her seem less like a challenger and more like a defending champ.”
If blatantly ignoring questions from reporters in order to spend more time talking with voters continues to be a campaign strategy, Clinton runs the risk of losing some support from a constituency she could always count on in the past: the “mainstream” press.
