Former-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manger Robby Mook and Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri joined Politico’s Mike Allen at Playbook Cocktails.
At times Clinton’s staffers failed to adequately answer any of the questions they were asked.
This was highlighted when Politico’s Annie Karni asked a simple question in reference to a 2007 Washington Post article that highlighted Hillary Clinton’s 2007 campaign strategy, which sounds eerily familiar to her current campaign strategy.
Bellow is the text of the exchange:
MIKE ALLEN: “Annie Karni came to Politico from the Daily News, had great coverage of the Clinton campaign and she has a question.”
POLITICO’S ANNIE KARNI: “Hi. There’s an article from 2007 that was kind of circulated today, and let me just read you one line from it. It said ‘Introducing biographical information about Clinton’s childhood and early adulthood, her advisers hope, will flesh out the familiar caricature of Clinton as an overly ambitious careerist who leaves scandal in her wake.’ And then there’s a quote from Howard Wolfson who was the campaign manager saying, ‘There are people who say they know everything about Hillary Clinton, and then you ask where she was born, and they have no idea.’ And the article talks about how she’s going to talk about her mother, her Midwestern roots and kind of re-introducing herself to the country. And this story read a lot like the stories we all wrote last night after you guys previewed some of your speech. And so I’m wondering, if you guys feel like you have to do it again, did it not stick last time? And if it didn’t stick, why’s it going to work this time?”
CLINTON COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR JENNIFER PALMIERI: “I can’t talk – I wasn’t part of, you know, ‘08 was a very different race in terms of… uhh…. There was, like, extraordinary interest on the Democratic side and umm, uhhh I think it’s hard to just compare the two situations. But it’s, you know she’s talked about this at times. Obviously she’s written about it in her books. But it’s true, it’s-it’s true just don’t know it about it, you know I talked to reporters yesterday and they said, well she does – you know, we don’t think people know it and we do think that uhhh, uhhhh, you know she talked about it tomorrow, we’ll do more of that. She has been doing it too. There is – I think it illuminates uhhh if you think you need this kind of fighter in the White House, it illuminates why and it’s true that people haven’t, that it hasn’t taken and I think that this is a different campaign in terms of uhh, you know what the press might focus on with her and uhhh we’ll stay at it.”