Hillary Tries Honey with Political Press

Hillary Clinton, you're going to hear about a hundred times today, melted the hearts of female New Hampshirites with her episode of public mistiness the other day.

But behind the scenes, she's been wooing another key constituency: the press.

From today's New York Observer:

There is close to a consensus, not only among reporters, but among people close to the Clinton campaign, that the Clinton media strategy of restricted access and aggressive tactics has not been an effective one.

The one-on-one interviews sprinkled out after campaign events, the coffee hand-delivered by Mrs. Clinton onto the press bus and the decreasingly rare press conferences were all evidence of a post-Iowa thaw in her campaign's infamously controlling and standoffish relationship with the media.

In the last week, she has taken to patting reporters' faces like an Italian grandmother, squeezing their arms and calling them "sweetie."

Did the media's excessive swooning over Barack Obama have something to do with the change, perhaps?

A friendlier stance may well allow Clinton to skim off some of that affection, but for now it's producing mainly bafflement among the reporters in the Clinton pool, who've had to endure months of icy standoffishness, says the Observer. When, a week ago, the candidate actually went so far as to venture onto the reporters' bus, "[n]o one shouted any questions and one writer compared the awkwardness to bumping into an ex-girlfriend."