OPINION:
If Hillary Clinton can’t stage-manage ordering lunch in an Iowa diner, with aides at hand, how can she manage a presidential campaign? This is the question worried Democrats are asking each other after Mrs. Clinton’s campaign ventured into the weeds in the Midwest, demonstrating that the feminists and a noisy claque of like-minded allies may be “ready for Hillary,” but she does not seem to be ready to persuade skeptical voters that she’s ready for them.
When she walked into a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa, the table looked set for the cameras. Hillary was meeting authentic Iowans, just folks, the kind she says she wants to champion. It looked real enough, but on closer examinations those authentic Iowans were actually campaign aides, borrowed from campaigns past.
American voters look first for honesty and integrity, and can spot the phony from a country mile. When a candidate offers only artificial authenticity, it’s likely to become stuff for the Internet, which has changed politics perhaps more than anything else in America. Just a whiff of mendacity can ruin the best-laid plans of mice and men — and women. The risk is bipartisan. Ted Cruz spread a masterful opening of his campaign at Liberty University, with cheers and enthusiastic students, but it turned out that attendance, like chapel in a few other schools, was mandatory. They still made a lot of noise.
Campaigns always spring diversionary surprises. A new Quinnipiac Poll of voters in New Jersey show 53 percent want Sen. Robert Menendez to resign, not because of anything he has been convicted of, but because he has been merely indicted. Any prosecutor could tell them there’s a distance, often a considerable distance, between indictment and conviction.
Mrs. Clinton’s trip to Iowa, from the start, had an air of artificiality about it. She was first said to be planning to drive the thousand miles to Iowa herself, which was unlikely because her permanent Secret Service detail, assigned to her as a former first lady, would never have allowed it. Her campaign tipped reporters that she would be stopping for lunch at a Chipotle south of Toledo, where she went unrecognized in dark glasses as she ordered a chicken burrito bowl with avocado, just like any other road warrior retreating from the Interstate. The manager of the Chipotle later found her image on a security tape, and gave that to reporters, figuring a little attention wouldn’t hurt business. It was just like Reality TV, which isn’t real, either.
Mrs. Clinton needs lessons in the art of both retail and wholesale politics, and there’s usually a master at it on the other side of her pillow. Bubba would still be at that Chipotle, needing no security tape as evidence that he had been there shmoozing, shaking hands, joking with customers, and locking down the vote in two ZIP codes. Hillary wants something like Warren Harding’s front-porch campaign of 1920, when he made speeches while never leaving home. Hillary dreams of no more receiving lines, no more salting the crowd with party hacks and hangers-on who will ask only friendly questions, something to look authentic on the evening news. That won’t work for her, if indeed it will ever work for anyone again. Too many people already know too much about her. She can run, as Mohammed Ali might tell her, but she can’t hide.
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