Hillary Clinton may just be running out the clock

Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post recently noted with considerable ire that Hillary Clinton hasn’t held a press conference in 263 days. For someone running to be the President of the United States that is, as Cillizza described it, ridiculous. Katie Pavlich speculated on what seems to be the obvious explanation… she can no longer keep all of her lies straight. In what passed for the “normal” politics of the past, this would the the death knell for any political campaign. If you don’t tell the press what’s going on they will generally start making up an explanation on their own and you’re probably not going to like it.

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Not so with Hillary Clinton. In fact, Politico speculates this week that she has no plans to explain the pay for play questions, talk about her email scandals or much of anything else. In fact, no news is good news in Clinton World right now and she may just be running out the clock on the election.

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to “run out the clock,” confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clinton’s team thinks “they can ride out” any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as top diplomat.

“That doesn’t mean no response,” one Clinton team insider said, “but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.”

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I was having a discussion on just this topic yesterday on the Jim Vicevich show where we talked about the tone of the media coverage throughout the entire Clinton email debacle. It’s not that cable news isn’t covering the various updates to the story… even they couldn’t get away with ignoring it entirely. But it’s the complete lack of interest in the serious nature of these revelations which is probably providing cover to the Democratic candidate. At this point, even when we find out that another 15,000 emails have been uncovered which were destroyed by Clinton’s team, there is no outrage. Yesterday afternoon I was watching several CNN hosts discuss it and you could clearly see the attitude on display which radiated an air of, what… this again? They just sound exhausted from talking about it and I have no doubt that much of the public gets the same impression.

The majority of Americans don’t spend the amount of time obsessing over political news that frequent readers of blogs and followers of the commentariat do. If they’re paying attention to the election news at all they’re getting their information in dribs and drabs. And if this is how the email story is being betrayed, why would they be all that put off by it?

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This may be by design or just a fortunate coincidence for the Clinton campaign, depending on your preferences, but Hillary clearly seems to be taking advantage of it. Not only is she refusing to schedule any pressers, but as Fox News reports, she’s not even out on the campaign trail at the moment.

Hillary Clinton is riding a summer wave in the polls – yet the Democratic nominee has left the campaign trail in recent days to fundraise in America’s wealthiest enclaves, potentially giving rival Donald Trump the opening he needs as he works to regain his political footing.

While Trump was balancing his fundraising Tuesday with a public rally and a town hall in Texas, Clinton once again was courting donors. Her fundraiser at the Hollywood Hills home of movie stars Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel follows a weekend fundraising spree in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

Yes, there’s always a certain amount of fundraising to be done, but Clinton has essentially disappeared. You see her on Jimmy Kimmel and a few other friendly, softball environments, but beyond that she’s sitting on a mountain of campaign funds which are keeping advertisements on the air all over the country. She’s not risking any unfortunate questions or the possibility of a public slip-up by putting herself out in the public eye. And the sad part of all of this is that she might just get away with it. It’s nearly the end of August and if she can avoid a major collapse at this point she might just coast over the finish line, dented and distrusted, but still the winner.

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