The Hillary Clinton interview drought is over.
Clinton spoke with two Iowa journalists on Sunday afternoon, Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register and Kay Henderson of Radio Iowa, in what amounted to her first sit-down interviews of the 2016 campaign.
The mere scheduling of the interviews was newsworthy because Clinton has come under criticism for sidestepping the press during her two-month-long campaign.
While she has taken questions at informal press conferences, she has stopped short of granting formal interviews, at least until Sunday.
The contrast with other, generally more accessible candidates has been stark — and some of Clinton’s Republican rivals haven’t been shy about pointing it out.
Clinton aides said Sunday’s interviews reflected a new phase of the campaign, one that follows Saturday’s well-received launch rally in New York.
She is likely to sit down for other interviews with local media outlets in the coming days.
“It’s very standard fare,” CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny said on “Reliable Sources.” “All candidates, when they come through, they sit down with Iowa reporters who have been asking questions of presidential candidates for a long time.”
There is no indication that Clinton will agree to any higher-profile national interviews, though appearances on talk shows like “The View” have been discussed.
One of Jeb Bush’s first appearances as a declared presidential candidate will be on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” on Tuesday.
Bush has been among the Republican heavyweights to knock Clinton’s press shyness. Some Democratic strategists, on the other hand, have supported the strategy, saying interviews come with a lot of potential downside for someone as prominent as Clinton.
Online and on television, journalists have been outspoken about the desire to interview Clinton, and The Atlantic’s Molly Ball, speaking on CNN’s “Inside Politics,” said the Clinton campaign has heard them.
“This whole time they’ve pretended that they basically don’t care about the criticism,” she said. “But this is a signal they have taken that to heart and they’re trying to rebut that perception.”
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Clinton campaign spokeswoman Karen Finney was challenged by moderator Chris Wallace about Clinton’s relative unavailability.
“They’re gotta do their campaign the way they’re gonna do their campaign, and we’re going to do our campaign the way we believe we’ve got to to win the four early states,” she said.
In Clinton’s interview with Henderson, the longtime news director for Radio Iowa, she was asked right away about the Trans Pacific Partnership, something that many journalists have been keen to ask about.
Henderson asked whether Clinton thought President Barack Obama mishandled the trade pact in negotiations with Republicans, and Clinton said, “Any trade agreement is going to be fraught with all sorts of problems.”
Clinton suggested sympathy for the President, adding, “I think that in today’s world it is a hard road to manage any trade agreement.”
She said she has advised that Obama “take the opportunity offered by staunch allies like Nancy Pelosi” to “figure out how to use this as leverage, to go back to the other countries and say: ‘You want a lot out of this. I need more. Our market is is still the biggest, most consumer friendly in the world, but I can’t go forward unless I get X, Y and Z from you.'”‘
“And I think that there is at least a potential opportunity for him to take this moment and as I said, kind turn lemons into lemonade,” Clinton said.