By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
You can never know what that wacky Hillary Clinton will
do next.
At the outset of her latest presidential campaign, she
decided to drive from New York to Iowa for her first campaign stop. Or, to be
more precise, she decided to be driven to Iowa by a Secret Service agent as
part of a three-car caravan in keeping with her security needs.
For a former first lady and global celebrity, this is
traveling light and spontaneous — let’s load up the Secret Service detail and
blow this joint.
Her campaign referred to her vehicle as “her Scooby van,”
evoking the lovable madcap crew of the cartoon series. This could be considered
a cute little affectation, until you realize that she campaigned in a van in
her 2000 Senate race, and for the same reason: to appear more relatable (the
Secret Service reportedly referred to that vehicle, too, as the Scooby-Doo
van).
Hillary Clinton has been reintroducing herself to the
public for so long that even her manufactured stabs at authenticity aren’t
entirely new.
Of course, the image she is trying to live down is the
Hillary of the “Saturday Night Live” sketches, whose calling card is her gratingly
insincere laugh and her cringe-inducing blatant calculations. It is her curse
as a politician of stamina and determination, but not of natural grace, that
her maneuvers to reveal her “real” self always feel like obvious maneuvers. To
say that she lacks the light touch is almost as much of an understatement as
saying her husband is not a monk.
Her announcement video spent more time dwelling on random
people pursuing their dreams than it did on Hillary herself, a gesture toward
her campaign’s focus on what she calls “everyday Americans.” These everyday
Americans presumably are to be distinguished from the “occasional” or
“once-a-week” Americans with whom Clinton spends her time in the normal course
of things — the highflying donors, dignitaries, celebrities, and operatives who
inhabit the upper tier of American politics that she has called home for nearly
25 years.
Hillary’s worst moments on her book tour last year were
her exaggerations, from the heights of her power, fame and wealth, of her own
economic struggles. Negotiating the contrast between her middle-class message
and her longtime upper-1-percent lifestyle would challenge an even more gifted
politician.
Driving is something everyday Americans do, well, every
day; Hillary hasn’t driven, not even a Scooby-Doo van, in 20 years. On the cusp
of her announcement, ELLE magazine did a glamorous spread on Chelsea Clinton
wearing Cartier, Bulgari, and Tiffany and Co. jewelry, as befits the daughter
of a burgeoning American political dynasty.
Perhaps Hillary can pull this off. It is easier to be a
wealthy champion of the downtrodden as a Democrat. Consider Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. But, with enough political ham-fistedness, it’s entirely possible to
come off as an out-of-touch phony. Just ask John Kerry. Hillary is closer to
the leaden Kerry or Al Gore on the spectrum of native political skill than she
is to her husband or Barack Obama.
As potentially the first woman to be elected president,
of course, she has “history” on her side. Kerry and Gore didn’t. But it’s not
clear that this will work for her as powerfully as it did for Obama. His
history-making first wasn’t just another item on his resume. It reinforced his
case that America needed a thoroughgoing break with the politics of the past.
Hillary will have many strengths — an electoral map that
tilts toward the Democrats, a Republican party that is still suffering a
hangover from the Bush years, prodigious fundraising. But her planned road trip
to the White House, even if she manages to get to her destination, will be more
a grim forced march than a joyful excursion. Its motto might as well be: Oh,
the fun we will pretend to have!
No comments:
Post a Comment