Early in 2016 Race, Clinton’s Toughest Foe Appears to Be the News Media

With no other powerful Democrats likely to run against her, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s toughest adversary for her party’s presidential nomination in 2016 has now become clear. It is an opponent that challenged her in the early 1980s over her use of her maiden name — and was hectoring her again on Tuesday over her use of personal email for State Department business. The New York Times reports.

“Did you or any of your aides delete any government-related emails from your personal account?”

“What lengths are you willing to go to prove that you didn’t?”

“The White House Counsel’s Office says that you never approved this arrangement through them. Why did you not do that?”

Probing, persistent questions like these from the political press corps at Tuesday’s news conference are the sort that rival candidates would be expected to ask on the campaign trail or in televised debates, as Barack Obama did against Mrs. Clinton in 2007 and 2008 over the Iraq war and other issues.

Unlike then, however, Mrs. Clinton is not expected to face comparably aggressive opponents for her party’s nomination. Among the possible Democratic field, former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland has shown little taste for cutthroat tactics. One can imagine Mrs. Clinton’s disarming Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent, with one of her signature belly laughs. The Republican candidates, at least for now, appear too busy jousting among themselves to do much damage to her.

Which leaves the news media.

Mrs. Clinton has long had a fraught relationship with journalists, given their demands for full disclosure and her own long-held belief that public figures deserve a “zone of privacy,” as she put it during Bill Clinton’s race in 1992, or a “scope” of “personal privacy,” as she said Tuesday.

With her first words at the news conference — asking reporters, “All set?” before delivering her remarks — Mrs. Clinton began a new and extraordinary chapter in her political life, one that could well last until the Democratic nomination is hers.

By going before journalists to try to put an end to the email story, which was first reported by The New York Times, Mrs. Clinton all but acknowledged that she was running for president, because why else would she submit to shouted questions from so many dubious antagonists?

And by holding the 21-minute news conference, in which she mounted a lawyerly defense through gritted teeth (“Let me try to unpack your multiple questions,” she told one reporter), she undertook the first round of sparring in an opponent-deprived but nonetheless pugilistic phase of the campaign that seems likely to last until a likely Republican nominee emerges next spring.

“Democratic primary voters may let her have the presidential nomination without a struggle, but the press won’t,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic strategist who has advised several presidential candidates, including Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. “The press will wage a kind of primary campaign against her, at least try to bring her down a peg or two. In the end, she will be the nominee, but she has to go through it first.”

The question is whether a news-media-driven primary will inflict the kind of damage to Mrs. Clinton that could affect her standing among independents, swing voters and undecided Democrats in the general election next year. Mr. Shrum, for example, helped Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry battle what he called “media caricatures” of their political records — that Mr. Gore was prone to overstatement and that Mr. Kerry was a flip-flopper, only for them to lose their general elections.

Mrs. Clinton’s poll numbers have remained strong among Democrats during the email uproar. But Tuesday was surely just her first face-off with the political press corps. And Election Day is 20 months away.

“I don’t think the press primary is helpful: It can get very annoying and distracting,” Mr. Shrum said. “Al Gore got tortured by the press for claiming that he invented the Internet, which he never claimed. But it’s hard to predict which controversies in the media will actually end up hurting.”

Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s two presidential campaigns and Chris Christie’s races for governor in New Jersey, said that an absence of top-tier Democratic campaign rivals would hurt Mrs. Clinton because the glare of the news media spotlight intensifies when a single person is in it.

“Without a serious Democratic primary opponent or a Republican nominee, she is caught in a race of Hillary v. Hillary, one that the media finds too juicy not to cover and one that might be impossible for her to win,” Mr. Schriefer said, arguing that she would come away badly damaged from a primary fight with the news media.

In some ways, though, the news media could be an ally for Mrs. Clinton over the next year. Without a sharp-toothed Democratic opponent, she may have few opportunities to hone her political skills, show her mettle or strengthen her armor in advance of a general-election fight with a Republican nominee.

How she and her emerging campaign organization react to critical articles and unwelcome surprises from the news media, as well as to questions posed by journalists in Democratic primary debates, will reveal her strengths and weaknesses as a candidate in some of the same ways that running against Mr. Obama did in 2007 and 2008.

Early in Tuesday’s news conference, she adroitly used the discussion of her personal email to try to connect with voters on issues of privacy. She noted that some of her correspondence dealt with “planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.” In that moment, Mrs. Clinton looked and sounded like a human being anyone could relate to. And then reporters started asking questions, and the jousting began.