This Is Not How You Run A Successful Presidential Campaign

When you don’t meet with actual people who might ask embarrassing or difficult questions that actual people have interest in hearing the answers to – and when you’re Hillary Clinton, who really doesn’t have a whole lot of justification for running for president in the first place given the volume of embarrassing and difficult questions her record has generated – it’s inevitable that your presidential campaign will develop some wobbly wheels.

Clinton’s campaign is wobbling.

The Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign part deux is less than a week old, and already reporters and opinionators across America are complaining.

She announced via a video, the ultimate way to control a message and avoid any engagement with real people or the press. She is undertaking a trip by van; nothing novel, simply a redux from her 2000 Senate campaign in New York. For now, at least, she is passing on talking policy in any real detail. For the foreseeable future, she appears interested in talking about relatively uncontroversial topics like “ways families can increase take-home pay, the importance of expanding early childhood education and making higher education more affordable,” or so her advisers told the Associated Press.

About the most exciting thing that has happened to the former secretary of state in the last week—and this includes her announcement—is visiting a Chipotle initially undetected, and subsequently having pictures of her burrito-ordering leaked and posted online.

It’s all so dull, so bland, so scripted, so planned, so typically political. And perhaps, just perhaps, it’s what American voters deserve.

That’s from Liz Mair, the public-relations expert who had to quit as a staffer for Scott Walker when a bunch of religious conservatives in Iowa complained about her being on his staff due to some social-liberal positions she’s taken. So her perspective, expressed in the rest of the Daily Best piece, is that America as a society is dumbed-down and boring and perhaps all that’s possible is a vapid and idiotic campaign like that which Clinton is running.

Mair is wrong about what the American people will take, though her position is understandable based on her experience and when she talks about how risk-averse the American people are becoming thanks to the overbearing regulatory state and the tyranny of political correctness. She’s also precisely right about the bland and scripted nature of Clinton 2016, though. For example, this

Hillary Clinton’s astroturf candidacy is in full swing in Iowa.

Her Tuesday morning visit to a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa was staged from beginning to end, according to Austin Bird, one of the men pictured sitting at the table with Mrs. Clinton.

Bird told Daily Mail Online that campaign staffer Troy Price called and asked him and two other young people to meet him Tuesday morning at a restaurant in Davenport, a nearby city.

Price then drove them to the coffee house to meet Clinton after vetting them for about a half-hour.

The three got the lion’s share of Mrs. Clinton’s time and participated in what breathless news reports described as a ’roundtable’– the first of many in her brief Iowa campaign swing.

Bird himself is a frequent participant in Iowa Democratic Party events. He interned with President Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign, and was tapped to chauffeur Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 when he visited Davenport.

‘What happened is, we were just asked to be there by Troy,’ Bird said Wednesday in a phone interview.

‘We were asked to come to a meeting with Troy, the three of us, at the Village Inn.’

The other two, he confirmed, were University of Iowa College Democrats president Carter Bell and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland employee Sara Sedlacek.

‘It was supposed to be a strategy meeting,’ Bird recalled, ‘to get our thoughts about issues. But then all of a sudden he says, “Hey, we have Secretary Clinton coming in, would you like to go meet her?”‘

‘And then we got in a car – Troy’s car – and we went up to the coffee house, and we sat at a table and then Hillary just came up and talked with us.’

Bird said ‘we all were called.’

‘I mean, Troy asked us all to do – to go to a meeting with him. And we didn’t really know what it was about. I mean, he did. He knew.’

Bland, scripted, stupid.

The only reason Barack Obama got elected, outside of the national yearning for racial harmony he promised and has utterly failed to deliver, was that he represented something completely different from the status quo in 2008. And poll after poll shows the American people are even more disgusted with the status quo in 2015 than they were then.

So Hillary Clinton refuses to put herself in front of real people for fear they’ll make her look bad, and she offers a staged reality show of a campaign.

Here’s the thing – reality shows increasingly have a short shelf life. They’ve got to continuously reinvent themselves because they get boring, fast.

So how does Clinton, whose campaign is already getting panned – when 85 percent of MSNBC’s polled audience gives her a thumbs-down – rev up her reality show?

When you intentionally go for scripted, bland and boring to cover up venality, hostility and corruption, and scripted, bland and boring doesn’t sell, what then?

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