Hillary Must Go Big to Win
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It’s quite obvious how this Clinton campaign is going to be covered by the media. Most of the visible manifestations will be soap opera, those kinds of mannered, Dowdian questions of which the press never seems to tire: Is she connecting, is she being “authentic,” is she acting too “ambitious,” is she wearing the right pantsuit, what’s up with her hair today, how is Bill behaving. There is, certainly, an extent to which questions like these are a legitimate part of the scrutiny of a presidential candidate, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Ben Carson, and I’ll ask them from time to time myself when they seem relevant. But somehow—for reasons that aren’t terribly mysterious—these questions always have been and now will be asked far more often of Clinton than of the others.
Underlying all that, invisible to the naked eye but always present, will be the element of Gotterdammerung that flows from the soap opera, which is to say: When the coverage is so intensely personality-focused as it will be with Clinton, it sets up a reality in which the media are just waiting for her to crack, to break; perched for the moment of downfall. I’m not saying it’s a conscious thing, or that the press will want her to fail for ideological reasons. It’s subtler than that.
In some ways, it’s really just about the narrative structures we’ve all learned and imbibed from television and movies: If the Clintons are a soap opera, coverage of them must by definition include stock soap-opera moments of tragedy and failure. Depending on how the cookie crumbles, it might also include the standard post-failure narrative arc of redemption and renewal, but that’s just a maybe. The other parts are definites.
So how does Clinton navigate these currents? I suspect she’ll go back in time a bit and use as her model for herself not her failed 2008 campaign (for obvious reasons) but her successful 2000 campaign for Senate in New York. We’ve already heard a few echoes of that race, when she launched her first “listening tour.” That happens to be the campaign I followed really closely, so I know a little about it (Wanna read my book on that race? It was good, but it’s been remaindered so long now that Amazon will probably pay you to take one.)
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/12/go-big-hillary.html