IMAGINING “HILLARY 5.0”IMAGINING “HILLARY 5.0”
Hillary Clinton has enlisted a Coca-Cola marketing whiz to help brand her expected presidential campaign.
This is quintessential Clinton. The most politically savvy couple in America has a penchant for seeking out the latest shiny toy, a magic bullet to make everything work.
—Albert R. Hunt, Bloomberg View
In the weeks leading up to Hillary’s announcement that she was running for president, her mansion at 3067 Whitehaven Street was the scene of feverish preparations.
Day after day, a whirl of experts passed through Whitehaven’s Secret Service checkpoint, where world-famous economists, bow-tied academics, burly union bosses, political machers, and Democratic Party grandees were required to open their briefcases for inspection and, in some cases, endure full-body pat-downs. The experts came from every quarter of the fractious Democratic Party, but most of them—like progressive economists Joseph Stiglitz and Alan Krueger—came from the Elizabeth Warren populist wing.
Hillary was shedding her reputation as a “centrist” and returning to her ideological roots on the Far Left. And no one—not even Elizabeth Warren—had more impressive credentials. As a twenty-something student at Yale Law School, Hillary had worked as a summer intern for the radical left-wing law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, and befriended the leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky.
Hillary’s tutorials with the experts were usually held in Whitehaven’s spacious dining room. She would show up looking tired and bedraggled and dressed in sweats or a muumuu. Visitors noticed that her hands visibly shook. She did not look healthy. Some came away from their encounter with Hillary wondering if she possessed the strength and vitality necessary for the demands of a nineteen-month-long political campaign.
She’d listen to the experts, ask questions, take notes, and then disappear through the French doors with a wave and a forced smile. No one could tell which of the advisers had scored a homerun with Hillary and which ones had struck out.
One of the first casualties of these meetings was the Spielberg likeability lessons.
Everyone agreed they weren’t working.
“For more than a decade, Mrs. Clinton has tried to swat away a persistent concern about her ability to connect with voters,” noted the New York Times. “‘Saturday Night Live’ recently captured that problem in a sketch featuring an actress playing Mrs. Clinton, who said of herself at one point, ‘What a relatable laugh!’ Years of security-infused Bubble Wrap around her travels and a wealthy lifestyle have done little to pull Mrs. Clinton closer to voters.”
“Given that [Hillary] has been in public life since 1992, it’s a bit incongruous to consider that her speaking style is often so lacking,” wrote the Washington Post. “She has yet to master ‘the big speech,’ which is part of the toolbox of any major politician.”
When Hillary spoke in public, she still had trouble making eye contact with her audience. Her eyes wandered from the text of her speech or her talking points to some unfocused spot on the ceiling and back again. Her voice was flat and uninflected. She was at her worst with members of the media; in the presence of journalists, she came across as scripted, charmless, and defensive.
“Her speaking style hasn’t improved,” wrote Sean Trende, the senior election analyst for RealClearPolitics. “If anything, she’s lost a step from 2008.”
In exasperation, Hillary quit taking the likeability lessons.
“I decided I had enough with the camera and the recordings and the coaches,” Hillary told a friend. “I got so angry I knocked the fucking camera off its tripod. That was the end of my Stanislavski period.”
Some of the biggest names in the world of corporate marketing strategy—Wendy Clark of Coca-Cola and Roy Spence of the Austin-based ad firm GSD&M—showed up at Whitehaven.
“People familiar with Clinton’s preparations said Clark and Spence are focused on developing imaginative ways to ‘let Hillary be Hillary,’ as one person said, and help her make emotional connections with voters,” reported the Washington Post. “Their job is to help imagine Hillary 5.0—the rebranding of a first lady turned senator turned failed presidential candidate turned secretary of state turned . . . 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. . . . In their mission to present voters with a winning picture of their likely candidate, no detail is too big or small—from her economic opportunity agenda to the design of the ‘H’ in her future campaign logo.”
When the new logo—a blue “H” with a rightward-facing red arrow—was unveiled in April 2015, it received a unanimous thumbs-down from art directors and graphic designers. The New Yorker ran a cartoon that showed two people gazing at a Hillary campaign poster with the “H” logo and a caption that read: “I’m just not entirely sure a big red arrow pointing right is the best logo for a Democratic candidate, is all.”
Kristina Schake, Michelle Obama’s former communications chief, was recruited to help Hillary become “authentic.” Schake had softened Michelle’s ballsy image by having her “mom dance” with Jimmy Fallon on TV, plant a White House vegetable garden, and schlep around a Target store in suburban Alexandria, Virginia.
It was unclear how Schake intended to rehabilitate Hillary, who posed a far greater public-relations challenge than Michelle had. Clinton insiders said that Schake might send Hillary to a shopping mall, and might even have Hillary appear on the Food Network. It seemed unlikely, however, that Schake would ask Hillary to follow in Michelle’s footsteps and break it down in hip-hop style.
But then, you never knew.
Schake must have remembered that, back in 1998, at the height of the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton, Hillary agreed to be photographed in a bathing suit on the beach in Saint Thomas, slow dancing with her horndog husband.
In any case, turning Hillary into a loveable Everywoman “who cares about people like me” wasn’t going to be easy.
As the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about Hillary: “A reputation for disingenuousness would seem to be particularly damaging, since any attempt to dislodge it is bound to be construed as another piece of insincerity.”
Hillary was as skeptical of the rebranding campaign as she had been of the Spielberg likeability lessons. She told friends that they reminded her of the numerous efforts that had been tried in the past—and that had failed—to make her warm and fuzzy.
“That,” she said, “isn’t me.”