Now, after 20-odd years in public life, we’re supposed to be seeing the “real” Hillary, who has found her “authentic” “voice.”
Really? As opposed to whom? The fraud of a Hillary who was little more than a robotic tool of her handlers and speechwriters?
The notion that Hillary now is “real” but somehow wasn’t quite “real” pre-New Hampshire — in other words, in Iowa — is laughable. Neither caricature is true.
One thing is certain: The Clinton machine’s heavy touch for image manipulation is as present and as intellectually condescending toward the electorate as ever.
Pollsters for a long time may be explaining how they blew the biggest miscall since “Dewey Defeats Truman.” The fact that pre-primary polling stopped three days before votes were cast might have something to do with their frothy data.
The absence of in-depth New Hampshire polling leaves us only to hazard guesses as to why voters in that state brushed aside Barrack Obama, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney — the supposed front-runners post-Iowa, in favor of Hillary and John McCain. But here’s one possibility that has nothing to do with spin-doctors and others who’ve been promoting all manner of gasified states of the campaign:
There remains a war on. Voters may not be prepared to choose as president a candidate whose sum total foreign policy and defense experience might have been to shake hands with a visiting trade delegation at a state capitol. Hillary is Democrats’ John McCain, a relatively safe bet in the eyes of many voters who just might not think this is a good time for a president to get entirely on-the-job training.
Despite the hyperventilations of cable-driven political coverage and its mandate to fill hours with blather and speculation, voters tend to be a lot wiser than to suddenly discover a “real” Hillary behind tears that might well have been shed on cue.