Modern Presidential candidates (at least, those with enough of a chance to make reporters want to question them) rarely give unfettered access to the media, John McCain being the closest to an exception which proves the rule. Candidates want to manage their message, and reporters are notoriously uncooperative in that respect, so it is little wonder. Hillary Clinton has raised evading the national press corps to an art form, though, as Howard Kurtz relates for the Washington Post:

ABC correspondent Kate Snow was ready to push through the crowd and ask Hillary Clinton a question until an aide blocked the path of Snow's sound man as he aimed his boom mike in the senator's direction.

"Sorry, we've gotta go," the woman said, though it was clear that Clinton would be shaking hands for some time.

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Such is life spent trailing the Clinton juggernaut, where reporters can generally get close enough to watch but no further, as if separated from the candidate by an invisible sheet of glass.

National correspondents are increasingly frustrated by a lack of access to Clinton. They spend much of their time in rental cars chasing her from one event to the next, because the campaign usually provides no press bus or van. Life on the bus means journalists don't have to worry about luggage or directions or getting left behind, since they are part of the official motorcade. News organizations foot the bill for such transportation, but campaigns have to staff and coordinate the buses -- and deal with the constant presence of their chroniclers.

Read the whole story at the link above. Hillary Clinton is in the most stressful position a candidate can occupy: a strong but not overwhelming frontrunner seeing some poll slippage as the voting gets closer. But her campaign's management of coverage - they once threatened to withhold Bill Clinton from a promised interview with GQ if the magazine ran an unfavorable story on Hillary's staff, and the story was killed - amounts almost to witness protection.

Hard to blame her, since she never knows when someone will expose another shady donor . . .