'Hard to Control'

For Bill Clinton the weeks leading up to today's primary have been grueling. Since last Monday alone the former president has traveled from Ohio to Texas to Rhode Island, back to Ohio, and then back to Texas again, shuttling between time zones as though it were part of some sadistic commuting routine.

In the final push before today's potentially decisive votes in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont, Bill Clinton is a supersurrogate campaigning like a candidate. On Sunday he stumped at eight different events across the state of Texas, including three unscheduled appearances at Houston-area church services. And yet the former president maintains that he is "not even a candidate. I'm just a free campaign aide," he says. And a tireless one at that.

While campaigning for his wife, Clinton has logged thousands of miles both on the ground and in the air, stumped with various political notables, from former astronaut and Ohio senator John Glenn to New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez. He has campaigned in blue-collar coal towns like Athens and largely Hispanic communities in Houston. He has signed countless copies of his memoir "My Life" and shaken even more hands.

The one thing Clinton hasn't done in weeks is field a single question from a journalist.

At events across Ohio and Texas, reporters are herded into makeshift paddocks, sometimes blocked off with traffic tape and safety cones, other times with metal gates. Matt McKenna, Clinton's traveling press secretary, jokingly refers to this area as "the cage."

It's not unusual for the press to be sequestered at campaign events. Journalists need space to work, and television crews can't afford to have their equipment jostled by the crowd. But reporters venture outside the Clinton "cage" at their peril.

At a rally in New Philadelphia, Ohio, on Friday, a reporter who needed to use the restroom was told she had to be escorted by a member of the Hillary Clinton advance team. Earlier last week, when the same reporter moved outside the press area to interview audience members, she was deemed dangerously close to Clinton's rope line and promptly asked to escort herself back to the press riser.

These days the rope line is the last place McKenna and campaign staffers want to see a journalist. One explanation: the Clintons have "a very long memory" and are withholding access as a means of punishing news outlets for printing or broadcasting unflattering content. After MSNBC correspondent David Shuster questioned whether the Clintons had "pimped out" their daughter Chelsea, for example, McKenna says Clinton canceled an exclusive interview with the network. But in the day-to-day of the campaign trail, Clinton's handlers seem less concerned with punishing offending journalists and more worried about what the former president might say to them. In late January one of Clinton's advisers told NEWSWEEK, "He's hard to control."