New York Times
11-12-07
Clinton Aides Prompted Queries at Events
By PATRICK HEALY
At two campaign events in Iowa this year, aides to Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton encouraged audience members to ask her specific questions, a tactic that
drew criticism from an opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination and
led her yesterday to promise that it would not happen again.
Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters in Iowa, said she was unaware that her aides
had ever planted questions.
“It was news to me,” said Mrs. Clinton, of New York, “and neither I nor my
campaign approve of that, and it will certainly not be tolerated.”
Staff members have been told to avoid doing so in the future, advisers said.
Planting questions with audience members, while not unheard of in political
campaigns, is generally avoided because of the embarrassing image it suggests
when the tactic becomes public: that a candidate is uncomfortable facing tough
questions or campaigning in unpredictable settings.
Iowa’s presidential caucuses are less than two months away, and Mrs. Clinton is
in a tight race there with Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards, a
former senator from North Carolina.
Political analysts said that while planting questions is not the worst sin of a
campaign operation, the practice could reinforce negative opinions about Mrs.
Clinton.
“The problem for Hillary Clinton is the whole spin that’s going to happen — that
she and her campaign are manipulative and scheming and that she is essentially
trying to bend the rules to maintain her lead in the polls,” said Steffen W.
Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University.
The practice came to light late last week when a student at Grinnell College in
Iowa, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, told her campus newspaper that a Clinton aide
had asked her to pose a question to Mrs. Clinton about global warming.
The request came during an event Tuesday in Newton, Iowa, where Mrs. Clinton
outlined her plan to create five million jobs in renewable energy sectors.
In a question-and-answer session with the audience, Mrs. Clinton called on
several people with raised hands; some of them asked friendly questions about
policy, and one man pressed her on trade issues.
At one point Mrs. Clinton called on Ms. Gallo-Chasanoff, who asked for the
senator’s ideas for combating global warming.
Ms. Gallo-Chasanoff did not return phone messages over the weekend seeking
comment. But the Grinnell College newspaper reported her as saying that the
Clinton aide told her the campaign wanted a question from a college student, and
that campaign staff members had prompted Mrs. Clinton to call on her.
A Clinton spokesman, Mo Elleithee, denied that Mrs. Clinton was aware of the
planted question or that she was directed to call on Ms. Gallo-Chasanoff. But he
confirmed that the campaign aide planted the question.
“It’s not something we do; it’s not an official campaign policy,” Mr. Elleithee said
yesterday. “But it is now an official campaign policy that we will not do this
moving forward.”
One of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents in the Democratic presidential race, Mr.
Edwards, used the incident to chide her, telling reporters yesterday that voters at
campaign events “expect you to stand in front of them and answer their hard
questions, and they expect it to be an honest process.”
“What George Bush does is plant questions and exclude people from events, and
I don’t think that’s what Democrats want to see,” Mr. Edwards said in Iowa.
In response, Mr. Elleithee said: “Senator Clinton has taken hundreds of questions
here in Iowa and across the country from voters and reporters, and she will
continue to. What George Bush does is attack the Democrats and divide the
country, and John Edwards’s campaign is resembling that more and more every
day.”
Last spring, an Iowa Democrat, Geoffrey Mitchell, said that a different Clinton
aide encouraged him to ask Mrs. Clinton about Iraq policy during a campaign
event, according to a news account at the time and a report Saturday on Fox
News.
Mr. Mitchell could not be reached for comment yesterday. He is supporting Mr.
Obama, according to Fox.
Mr. Elleithee said yesterday that this second instance was not an example of a
planted question. Rather, he said, the aide and Mr. Mitchell were loosely familiar
with each other and they were talking about Iraq, and the aide suggested that Mr.
Mitchell ask a question.
“We often encourage people who have questions about the senator’s policies to
ask her questions about them,” Mr. Elleithee said.