“There will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious,” New York Times Hillary-beat veteran Amy Chozick reports. James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal quipped: “So Mrs. Clinton’s team is embarking on a campaign of effortful spontaneity and carefully choreographed unscriptedness.”
The press-release headline was "Hillary Clinton to Show More Humor and Heart, Aides Say." Taranto noticed the Times keeps repeating itself. Mrs. Clinton “desperately wants to present an everywoman’s approachability,” Chozick wrote back in April.
Taranto even went back to 2007, when Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed how pointless this might seem, even as the networks keep packaging up this spin with a bow:
Back in the ’92 race, Clinton pollsters devised strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal. Fifteen years later, her campaign is devising strategies to humanize her and make her seem more warm and maternal.
The public still has no idea of what part of her is stage-managed and focus-grouped, and what part is legit. It’s pretty pathetic, at this stage of her career, that she has to wage a major offensive, by helicopter and Web testimonials, to make herself appear warm-blooded.
Chozick even helped Hillary by respreading the obnoxious claim that the released e-mails “humanize” her: “The campaign has even tried to make the best out of the private emails released by the State Department, saying details revealed in the messages, like Mrs. Clinton’s TV preferences (The Good Wife and Parks and Recreation), help humanize her.”
There's no acknowledgment that The Good Wife is all about a woman who runs for office after her husband very publicly cheated on her? Or that's how we unsubtly remind people of the poor-victim-Hillary spin?
Hillary will apparently try to "shed her scriptedness" by going on the Ellen DeGeneres show and Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show. But those are routine "humanizing" stops. The idea they're very "unscripted" shouldn't be convincing.
Taranto also mocked this Times headline, from Saturday: “Hillary Clinton Urges Cooperation on Inquiry Into Her Emails, as She Finds Joy Elsewhere”. Jonathan Martin's story concluded:
As she walked away from the podium with Ms. Shaheen, Mrs. Clinton raised her arms and her voice: “And off we go, joyfully,” she said.
And finally, Taranto mocked this line as an "Out on a Limb" proposition on the e-mail scandal from an editorial in leftist British paper The Guardian: “The possibility remains that [Hillary Clinton] wanted to avoid oversight and thought she could get away with it.”
They dismissed the e-mail scandal with a harrumph: "All that seems to be established at this stage, apart from the fact that it was unwise and possibly illegal to use such a means of communication, is that friends, family and former aides kept weighing in with advice, comments, and information, much of it quite shrewd."
They think she should be the first female American president, a "liberating" prospect no matter how much socialism is enacted: "In addition to all her years in politics, as partner to her husband during his presidency, as senator, and as secretary of state, she offers Americans for the first time the possibility of having a woman as head of state, a prospect as liberating in a different way as that which opened up when Barack Obama became the first black president."
But this line was also a laugher: "The more fundamental reason why her ship is in the doldrums is that she has not so far projected anything like the broad moral vision that Mr Obama at his best displayed, or which won the presidency for her own husband."
Not many people at this late date can put the concepts of “broad moral vision” and “Bill Clinton” in the same sentence without snickering. At least the word “broad” has to be removed.
