Mrs. Clinton says she’s just a regular gal — and in Washington, she almost is.
The other day, Bill Clinton blamed the press for his wife’s recent political troubles. But most of the fault is her own — for talking to the press.
She’s not good at it.
For two Sundays in a row last month, instead of going to church, Hillary Clinton appeared on Sunday-morning talk shows. Her first appearance, on CBS’s Face the Nation, was weird even by her standards. What made it weird was that she laughed, and laughed repeatedly, on occasions that should not have elicited laughter from a person not high on marijuana.
Asked to define herself in three words, Clinton provided 61. “Just three?” she asked, roaring with fake laughter. “I can’t possibly do that!” This must have been one of those hard choices that her last book was about.
The question shouldn’t have stumped her. Clinton has defined herself in three words before. In 1992, for instance, she said, “I am me.” And that’s her problem.
When running for office, Clinton tries to convince people that she is one of them. In 2008, explaining a “misstatement” she made about encountering sniper fire in Bosnia, she said, “I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I’m human, which, you know, for some people is a revelation.”
RELATED: Humanizing Hillary: The Impossible Dream
She never misses an opportunity to play the “I’m human” card.
“I mean, look, I am a real person,” she chuckled maladroitly on Face the Nation, helpfully adding, “Real people actually go shopping, you know?”
Yes we do.
As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2000, Clinton elaborated on her experience as a human by cataloguing all the banal things she had done in her life:
I’ve been the harried, pressured working mom. I’ve been the concerned, anguished parent about everything from ballet recitals to school curriculum. I’ve lived through the death of one of my parents and my mother-in-law. I have all the experiences that women today face.
Such as?
I went grocery shopping for the first time in years the other day.
What do you do with those groceries?
I make a mean tossed salad and a great omelet.
And how did you get to the grocery store?
Before the White House, even though we lived in the governor’s mansion, I drove my own car most of the time.
You know, just like other women with cars and governor’s mansions.
In addition to being a real human woman person, Clinton is a bona fide politician — indeed, almost a caricature of one: calculated, pandering, and dishonest. And those are her best qualities. Worst of all, she’s dull.
#share#Even her “behind-the-scenes conversations,” she has acknowledged, are “kind of boring.” At least her conversations are consistent. This is one area where comparisons of her with Richard Nixon do not apply. Nixon was, for all his faults, fascinating; Clinton is not. This puts her at odds not only with Nixon but also with her husband, who managed to feel other people’s pain as well as their private parts. He did for C-SPAN what O. J. Simpson did for Court TV: make boring stuff interesting.
RELATED: Brand New Image, Same Old Hillary
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has tried so diligently to rid herself of negative attributes that she has rid herself of all discernible human attributes. Which is why, instead of acting like a normal person, she keeps saying she’s a normal person, which is abnormal. And when she acts like a normal person, it’s obvious she’s acting. She can laugh, but only after one of her aides presses a button.
This presidential campaign is largely a contest of personalities, and it is one for which Clinton is both underqualified and overprepared.
#related#Her fake laughter on Face the Nation was all part of her master plan, it turns out. A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that Clinton’s campaign was initiating “new efforts to bring spontaneity” to her candidacy. However, the efforts are not new. “Mrs. Clinton Works Hard on Her Spontaneity,” proclaimed a headline in the New York Times — in 2000.
Rather than giving interviews on the three major networks, Clinton should start giving them on QVC, the Cooking Channel, and Comedy Central. If nothing else, she will make potheads laugh and thereby, if she’s lucky, deprive Bernie Sanders of his main base of support.