The Clinton campaign juggernaut is working feverishly to promote her image as someone who understands, who relates to, what she calls “Everyday Americans” — what some are shorthanding to “EDAs.”
So her launch tour included a truck stop in Pennsylvania, a Chipotle in Ohio and just hanging out with regular folks. (By the way, what is an Everyday American? Are there Someday Americans? Every-other- day Americans? Thursday Americans?)
In any event, the low-key launch and van trip to Iowa seemed to have gone quite well overall, despite the usual media carping.
So it was most unfortunate last week when Paris Match, the French version of People, decided to come out with a large spread on Clinton, with a cover photo — the same shot that graced People when her memoir came out last year. It’s the one by her pool at her home, which the magazine (incorrectly) says is in Georgetown, the “chic quarter of Washington.”
But she looks splendid, sporting a stunning diamond that’s known as the “I’m sorry, really sorry, very sorry, sorry, sorry” ring. Then there’s some French (which we don’t speak) that may say something like “we both like escargot, especially at Le Meurice.”
The inside photo spread includes some wonderful shots with her puppy, granddaughter Charlotte, with President Obama in the Oval Office and on Air Force One, and the iconic group photo in the situation room the night Seal Team Six got Osama bin Laden.
Alas, for reasons quite unclear — and frankly, way off-message — the magazine decided to include photos of Bill and Monica in the White House, Bill’s grand jury testimony and another of Hillary standing by him when he said “I never had. . . .” (Next time the Germans invade, the French better hope she’s not in the Oval Office.)
And then there’s the once-promoted photo of her in sunglasses checking her e-mails on her BlackBerry.
The text — translated by our colleague Lisa Rein — is, for the most part, reasonably fawning.
The piece notes she’s not a natural campaigner, but her recipe for success is to “transform her weakness into a strength.” Her model, the article says, would be the formidable German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom “she shares the same pantsuits, the same wrinkles, the same aversion to Botox and to the cult of youth.”
There’s one Hillary, the magazine posits: “the humiliated wife, the cynic, the Machiavellian.”
But that has been supplanted by the new Hillary, “the grandmother who’s happy to be a grandmother and proud of it. A woman of 67 who accepts her age and physique, ultra-competent, ripened by experience. The voice of wisdom.”
So is this going to be enough to get into the White House? Maybe. Maybe not. “The truth is, the ex-first lady of the United States is not ‘Madame Everyone,’ ” Paris Match concludes: “And that’s the rub.”
Al Kamen, an award-winning columnist on the national staff of The Washington Post, created the “In the Loop” column in 1993.
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