The news has been rather maudlin lately, and will likely remain so for a while, but at least we’ll have the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to provide comic relief for the next year and a half. Every campaign’s attempts to make the candidate seem a regular down-home American are faintly ridiculous, but in Clinton’s case it is downright hilarious. The spectacle evokes the image of Bill and Hillary Clinton at leisure in one of their mansions, much like King Arthur and Guinevere in “Camelot,” wondering “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” and coming up with the most wildly inaccurate conjectures.
Just this week has seen Clinton scooting across Grant Wood’s Iowa in a vehicle that has been dubbed the “Scooby Doo van,” making her putatively routine visit to a Chipotle franchise, chatting amiably with plain old midwestern folks at some Frank Capra-esque watering hole, wandering the halls of some distinctly non-Ivy League campus, and grousing about the indue influence of rich people’s money on America’s once-pristine politics. All of it was so obviously contrived that even the press noticed, and actual regular down-home Americans were far less likely to be fooled by any of it.
Even the playful moniker for her upscale black van has managed to rile some fans of the old “Scooby Doo” cartoon series, who recall that Scooby and Shaggy and the rest of the show’s ghost-busting gang of wholesome teenage sleuths travelled in a psychedelically colorful vehicle called “The Mystery Machine.” We’re just young enough to have some familiarity with the show, and just old enough to have noticed how very awful it was even by herky-jerky animation standards of the Hannah-Barbera studio, but there’s a younger cohort of voters who take such details seriously and will note the inauthenticity of the allusion. The “Scooby Doo” characters didn’t have two accompanying black vans full of Secret Service agents, either, nor did any state Highway Patrols clear traffic for their madcap capers, and such details will not go unnoticed by all those “millennials” who take their childhood television favorites more seriously than politics. Clinton might yet get to say the familiar catchphrase of the cartoon’s villains during their inevitable bad end just before the last commercial break, “I would have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids,” but otherwise any attempt to suck any good will out of that awful old cartoon series will run false for its fans.
That highly-publicized visit to Chipotle also struck a discordant note. We’d hate to sound more regular down-home American than thou, but we’ve never once set foot inside in a Chipotle because our regular down-home American town has seen such a wave of immigration from Mexico that the place is chockfull of Mexican eateries far more deliciously authentic and inexpensive than those franchised and suspiciously modern Chipotle places look to be. Our last visit to Iowa suggested that most of its towns have similarly benefited from the immigration wave, so Clinton would have been well advised to drop in one of the many seedier but tastier joints that her “Scooby Doo van” surely passed, even if that did entail the risk Sen. Marco Rubio or Sen. Ted Cruz or Gov. Estella Martinez or even Gov. Jeb Bush or any other other potential Republican contenders upstaging her by dropping in on the same joint and ordering in Spanish. Putting a buck in the tip jar might have been a nice touch, too, and spared her some sneering coverage from usually friend press.
Those regular down-home Americans that Clinton was photographed chatting with turned out to be Democrat operatives, of course, although it took Britain’s Fleet Street press to uncover that easily uncovered fact. The wandering through the hallways of that non-Ivy League necessitated locking the non-Democratic operative students in their classrooms, lest they come into unscripted contact with the regular down-home American candidate, and even the American press acknowledged that. All that blather about the undue influence of rich folks’ money was respectfully reported, although without any ironic reference to the stories running elsewhere about the $2.5 billion campaign fund that Clinton is raising from her friends in Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Wall Street and other environs of the rich folk.
This charade might impress the accompanying press corps, who at various stops have outnumbered the “everyday people,” in the condescending phraseology of the Clinton campaign’s announcement video, but that’s because the reporters who get such plum assignments aren’t regular down-home Americans. Out here in flyover country even the Democrats are bound to notice how very phony it is, and the Clinton campaign would be well advised to switch to the aristocratic hauteur and claims of Ivy League entitlement that somehow made “Camelot” such an appealing image for the Kennedy administration.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 