Her lay low approach and runout the clock approach backfired.
WASHINGTON (AP) — All summer long, Hillary Clinton delighted in snappy attack lines about Donald Trump.
Electing the billionaire, she warned, would be a “historic mistake.” The Republican nominee perpetuates “outlandish Trumpian ideas.” Clinton reveled in imagining her rival “composing nasty tweets” as she derided him as “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified” to be president.
But as the campaign moves into the final stretch, Clinton finds herself chasing an even more elusive target: herself.
Just seven weeks before Election Day and Clinton’s poll numbers slipping, her campaign is trying — yet again — to explain one of the world’s most famous politicians to a skeptical public.
The effort marks an unusual moment of introspection for Clinton, who has long refused to engage in the kind of public self-examination that can help transform would-be heads of state into relatable figures.
The start of September brought a series of near-apologies from Clinton, a notable shift for a candidate who took months to express remorse for her decision to use a private email system while running the State Department.
Her vote for the Iraq war and decision to set up a private email server in her suburban New York home were both “a mistake,” she said at a national security forum hosted by NBC. A late-night comment at a fundraiser that half of Donald Trump’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables” prompted a quick statement of partial regret — for branding “half” of them that way.
And her campaign took “responsibility” for not being “fast enough” in disclosing she had pneumonia after a video showed Clinton staggering leaving a 9/11 ceremony.
She also lamented that some voters view her as aloof.
“I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional,” she said in her post to the popular website Humans of New York. “And neither do my friends. And neither does my family.” She went on: “But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”