snip;
Hillary’s Authentic Inauthenticity That relatable smile...
by Charles Krauthammer April 16, 2015 3:53
PM See Hillary ride in a van! Watch her meet everyday Americans! Witness her ordering a burrito bowl at Chipotle! Which she did wearing shades, as did her chief aide Huma Abedin, yielding security-camera pictures that made them look (to borrow from Karl Rove) like fugitives on the lam, wanted in seven states for a failed foreign policy.
There’s something surreal about Hillary Clinton’s Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners. But what else can she do?
After Barack Obama, she’s the best-known political figure in America. She has papal name recognition. Like Napoleon and Cher, she’s universally known by her first name.
As former queen consort, senator and secretary of state, she has spent a quarter-century in the national spotlight — more than any modern candidate.
SLIDESHOW: Hillary Hits the Road
She doesn’t just get media coverage; she gets meta-coverage. The staging is so obvious that actual events disappear.
The story is their symbolism — campaign as semiotics. This quality of purposeful abstractness makes everything sound and seem contrived. It’s not really her fault.
True, she’s got enough genuine inauthenticity to go around — decades of positioning, framing, parsing, dodging — but the perception is compounded by the obvious staginess of the gigantic political apparatus that surrounds her and directs her movements.
Why is she running in the first place? Because it’s the next inevitable step in her career path. But that’s not as damning as it seems. It can be said of practically every presidential candidate.
The number of conviction politicians — those who run not to be someone but to do something — is exceedingly small. In our lifetime: Ronald Reagan. And arguably, Barack Obama, although with him (as opposed to Reagan) a heavy dose of narcissistic self-fulfillment is admixed with genuine ideological conviction.
all of it here
Read more at:
National Review
