When it rains bad p.r. and openings for opponents, it pours for the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton:

The college student who was told what question to ask at one of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign events says “voters have the right to know what happened” and she wasn’t the only one who was planted.

In an exclusive on-camera interview with CNN, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, a 19-year-old sophomore at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, said that giving anyone specific questions to ask is “dishonest,” and the whole incident has given her a negative outlook on politics.

What’s most striking about this tempest in a political teapot — that can boil over on and ruin the kitchen floor — is that it shows that, for all of its sophistication, the Clinton campaign has not yet adapted to the age of blogs, the mega-second news cycles, and YouTubes. Not to mention cable news and talk radio which needs a constant feed of new material.

Any little issue can knock a front runner off the leading edge and, if a lot of cases come out, Ms. Clinton will become a comedian’s punch line (she can THANK GOD for the writer’s strike because Leno and Letterman would have a ball with this one).

Roger Simon writes in The Politico:

Does Hillary Clinton really need to plant questions?

Does the Clinton campaign really need to twist a college kid’s arm to ask Clinton a question about climate change at a climate change event?

The answer, of course, is NO.

So why would the Clinton campaign do it, especially since getting caught is so embarrassing?

Because the culture of control in presidential campaigning has gotten way out of control.

Staffs now want to control every moment of the campaign: not just what the candidate says and how she says it, but what questions she gets asked about it.

In 1988, Roger Ailes, who was George H.W. Bush’s media guru, gave an interview to Advertising Age magazine and was asked if there was a difference between selling a candidate to the American people and selling a box of cookies to the American people.

“There’s an enormous difference between cookies and candidates,” Ailes said. “Cookies don’t get off the shelf and hold news conferences or make gaffes or go on ‘Meet the Press.’” So the name of the game for presidential campaigning is to control the candidate so he gets “off the shelf” as rarely as possible.

But these days, there is a risk that if it’s done clumsily the candidate could suffer but not always. Mrs. Clinton’s reportedly used a planted question during her Senate run and although it was publicized there was little fallout in that race.

Simon also notes that the recent FEMA fiasco where bigwigs decided to hold a press conference and use their staffers as fake reporters was one sign that this kind of news management isn’t popular with the public. And, he adds, Senator Clinton is not pleased about the pre-arranged questions:

I talked to a senior Clinton aide Monday who said Clinton was “furious” when she found out about the practice.

And I am guessing that she really did not know about it.

Because when staffers plant questions, it means they don’t trust the candidate to handle herself in public. They don’t think she can answer real questions from real people.

Either Clinton can or she can’t. Planting fake questions will not make up for her deficiencies or showcase her talents.

So, memo to Clinton staffers: Trust your candidate or find a new one. Let Hillary be Hillary.

And I’ll add this:

Yes, let Hillary be Hillary because dumb shenanigans like this will backfire and hurt her candidacy. News stories such as the ones about the planted questions instantaneously destroy millions of dollars of images created in advertising and hours of impressions voters garner when she appears on shows such as “Meet The Press.” She can perform well in a debate, but planted questions leave the suggestion out there the staff is too afraid to let questioners come up with their OWN questions for her.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

UPDATED: Lots of news about Hillary Clinton and a lot of it should be heartening to her and her camp.

–Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey thinks Hillary Clinton will win and he tells why HERE. A few excerpts (written from the standpoint of a GOPer):

If the 2008 presidential election were held today, Hillary Rodham Clinton would win.

Hillary’s minor stumbles in last week’s debate notwithstanding, she is simply running the most disciplined and effective campaign. She’s one of the most able politicians in America, and no one should underestimate her desire to be President and her calculating focus.

What you need to understand is that Hillary Clinton is, quite simply, craftier and more aggressive than the rest of the field. I know this firsthand, having battled with the Clinton Administration throughout the 1990’s while serving as a leader in Congress.

She’s only gotten tougher since then.

AND:

First and foremost, the Republican brand as effective stewards of the taxpayer dollar is in tatters, and the shredding doesn’t look to stop any time soon. Just yesterday, 138 House Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to override the president’s veto of a wasteful and pork-ridden Water Resources bill. That vote was a shameful display of personal politics over the national interest, and it contains the seeds of destruction of whatever conservative principles remain in the Republican party.

The callow accommodation to big-spending Democrats in Congress is one of the ways the Republican party will return itself to the days of serving as a compliant, permanent minority. Happy for table scraps, elected Republicans will simply abandon the ideas of their party in order to “get along”.

No wonder Americans prefer Democrats on the economy, taxes, and spending issues, according to recent polling data. When the choice is between Democrats, and the Democrat-lite ideas the GOP has become so comfortable offering, the Democrats will win every time.

The only way the Republican party will beat Hillary Clinton is to return to its limited-government roots. That’s the only way to rebuild a majority coalition.

He argues, in essence, that the Republican Party has lost its political soul:

To counter Hillary Clinton’s perfectly oiled political machine, Republicans need to return to their Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan roots. They need to present an alternative vision for America—a positive vision that limits government and trusts individuals and leaves families, churches, and businesses free to make their own decisions, and not have bureaucrats and politicians calling the shots.

Right now, the country is headed toward a date with Hillary Clinton, and big government is on the agenda. The only way to change that rendezvous is for candidates to offer a clear, principled, limited government alternative.

Read it all.