http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-hillarys-shelved-crown.html?ref=opinion Hillary’s Shelved Crown
APRIL 18, 2015
Frank Bruni
THE 2016 presidential campaign is only now gathering steam and already I’m confused.
For starters, Hillary Clinton says she’s focusing on “everyday Americans.” Which of the nation’s voters don’t fall into that category? Are there voters who are Zimbabweans on Wednesdays? Costa Ricans on Saturdays? Voters who relinquish their citizenship on months beginning with the letter J?
“Everyday Americans” specifically included “everyday Iowans” when Clinton traveled across the heartland in her Scooby van with Huma Abedin, who clings to her so tightly that their relationship could be called marsupial. The duo stopped at a Chipotle near Toledo, Ohio, for a burrito bowl, which is an everyday meal. At another point, Clinton suggested a fondness for bowling, which is an everyday sport.
By “everyday” she obviously means “ordinary,” “regular,” “run-of-the-mill.” She’s euphemizing averageness. And she’s playing to the plaint among many Americans that the rich have their government perks and the poor their government handouts but the larger number of people in the middle have nothing but rents and mortgages and tuition and health care premiums that they struggle to pay.
But is “everyday” a signifier that a voter really craves and feels complimented by? Is it the ideal epithet? You, kind sir, are utterly unexceptional and thus have my devotion. You, dear madam, recede into the cornfields, unnoticed and unnoticeable, but I will find and meet you among the stalks. Maybe we’ll split a burrito bowl.
On balance I think that Clinton’s rollout, an oxymoronic wonder of planned spontaneity and engineered authenticity, was successful if unsubtle.
What she needed most was to take the bejeweled crown off her head and put it on a shelf, and it didn’t ultimately matter if she appeared to be saying, or even shouting, “Look, America, I’m taking the bejeweled crown off my head and putting it on a shelf! I’m driving the distance to Des Moines, for heaven’s sake! I’ll walk if you insist!” One way or another, the un-coronation had to commence. And so it did, with an announcement video in which she barely appeared, the afterthought rather than the cynosure, and a road trip in a vehicle seemingly plucked from a cartoon.
“After 25 years in the public eye, Mrs. Clinton has suddenly developed the capacity to surprise,” wrote Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman in The Times. That, readers, is called winning the week.
Contrast the manner in which Clinton navigated the days following the announcement of her presidential candidacy with the manner in which Rand Paul navigated the days following the announcement of his.
I’m not sure I’ve ever beheld a debut so confounding, because he was entirely unprepared or unwilling to field the foreign-policy flip-flop questions that he was certain to get — and that were warranted. And rather than project gameness for an inevitably grueling process, he radiated resentment: How dare you grill me about my past. What nerve to ask questions I dislike.
In general I find our presidential races gratuitously long and excessively crammed with rituals and gamesmanship that have nothing to do with anyone’s fitness to govern, but there’s an upside: In the crucible of the campaign, a candidate’s true temperament is revealed.
And Paul’s is all wrong, an unsavory amalgam of insouciance, arrogance and irascibility. If he can’t bear up under a justly (and only modestly) combative interrogation by Savannah Guthrie on the “Today” show, how could he possibly survive the general-election onslaught from a Clinton war room, if she nabbed her party’s nomination and he (somehow, God help us) nabbed his?
Marco Rubio is a much better wager for Republicans, even if he looks, physically, like he might be ready for the presidency in ... 2028. While other politicians try to figure out how to smooth their faces without too glaring an intervention, he has to figure out how to wizen his. He’s the field’s dermatological dissident.
But that’s not the central riddle of his pitch. This is: He’s auditioning to replace Barack Obama and reverse Obama’s policies, but with a strikingly similar rationale.
He’s saying that he brings the fresh perspective of a new generation. That he’s tomorrow, not yesterday. That what he lacks in maturity, he makes up for in upbeat oratory and skills as a communicator. That he’s a symbol and signal of a changing America. That he’d set an important precedent: the first Hispanic presidential nominee for a major party, just as Obama was the first black one.
“Are you our Obama?” he was asked, succinctly and point-blank, by the Republican strategist and foreign policy adviser Dan Senor during a private question-and-answer session with potential donors in New York City recently.
Unlike Paul, Rubio had clearly rehearsed for the trickier queries that would come his way, including this one. According to someone at the event, he said that the issue with Obama wasn’t his greenness coming into office. It was his priorities and decisions once he got there. Rubio also noted that he has spent more time in the United States Senate than Obama had in 2008 and that his previous legislative career in Florida was longer and more prominent than Obama’s in Illinois.
Rubio is dexterous with his remarks and with the news media. That was the main takeaway from his own rollout last week, and it was a hallmark, also, of the months leading up to it. When Scott Walker couldn’t muster a nimble, sensible response to Rudy Giuliani’s dig that Obama didn’t love America, Rubio told a television reporter this:
“I don’t feel like I’m in a position to have to answer for every person in my party that makes a claim. Democrats aren’t asked to answer every time Joe Biden says something embarrassing, so I don’t know why I should answer every time a Republican does. I’ll suffice it to say that I believe the president loves America; I think his ideas are bad.”
Those words had probably been formulated in advance, but as the respectful reception of Clinton last week demonstrated, Americans tend not to give candidates too many demerits for being scripted, because developing the right script reflects qualities we want in a leader: discipline, meticulousness, even a certain modesty.
Clinton was attempting to convey all of those. The transparency of the effort didn’t nullify it. And while she can’t erase all that time in private jets bound for lucrative speeches, the hours in a Scooby van bound for Chipotle are nonetheless an exercise in obeisance, a proclamation to Americans: You told me how I’ve erred, I’m showing you that I’ve heard.
It’s a bit of groveling, garnished with guacamole.
