The tears of a candidate, redux
Posted 44 weeks 6 days ago byLots of people wonder if Hillary Clinton's moment of choking up -- she didn't seem to cry, so I'm not going to call it that -- helped give her the New Hampshire victory. Perhaps because of that, plenty of otherwise-smart people are trying to figure out whether that moment was real or fake, planned or spontaneous:
Now let’s remember that Hillary Clinton is a professional. She’s been through lots of campaigns, and lots of other pressure-packed situations. I am most definitely not saying that it would have been impossible for her to get choked up. What I am saying is that it is almost impossible to believe that if she wanted to, she would not have been able to compose herself.
And that comes from a liberal magazine.
Here's the thing, though: Nobody knows. If somebody offered real evidence -- say a participant in a meeting where the whole thing was planned -- then that would definitely be newsworthy, because it would strike at the heart of her authenticity as a candidate. (I would say the same thing of any male candidate, by the way.)
But in the absence of such evidence, all you have is speculation. Silly speculation. Time to move on to other matters.
Thoughts
"Clintonian" Phoniness?
Submitted on August 8th, 2008 by AnonymousThis type of phoniness is rampant in the U. S. government. To call it Clintonian is just plain, well, Republican. What a terrible way to be!
Re: The tears of a candidate, redux
Submitted on January 9th, 2008 by Jim LakelyBefore we ... er ... MoveOn, Joel. A couple of points, while granting that this is silly speculation -- but interesting to me nonetheless.
The skepticism over the sincerity of Hillary's humanizing moment -- that you correctly note is bipartisan -- is rooted in the long history of Clintonian phoniness and staged campaign events:
There is Hillary's habit of planting questioners in her audience -- complete with feigned surprise at seeing an long-lost Sunday School teacher that Hillary was photographed greeting at an event earlier in the year.
And, taking a trip on the Way-Back Machine, we recall Bill Clinton laughing it up at Ron Brown's funeral -- until he sees a camera on him and wipes a fake tear from his eye.
Then there's the famous flap where Bill and Hillary express shock and dismay that photographers would be around to snap pictures of them dancing to no music on the beach as the Paula Jones/Monica mess was about to get messier.
Of course "nobody knows" if the whole thing was staged. In the language of Don Rumsfeld, it's perhaps an "unknown unknown." Hillary got busted on the planted questioners only because the plants flapped their leaves.
But I must say that the question posed to Hillary, the final one of her intimate event, sure sounded like one of her famous set-ups: "My question is very personal, how do you do it?" asked Marianne Pernold Young, a freelance photographer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She mentioned Clinton's hair and appearance always looking perfectly coifed. "How do you, how do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?"
Yet the irony of ironies? The photographer who solicited Hillary's human moment ended up voting for Obama.