You can never know what that wacky Hillary Clinton will do next. At the outset of her latest presidential campaign, she decided to drive from New York to Iowa for her first campaign stop. Or, to be more precise, she decided to be driven to Iowa by a Secret Service agent as part of a three-car caravan in keeping with her security needs. For a former first lady and global celebrity, this is traveling light and spontaneous — let’s load up the Secret Service detail and blow this joint.
Her campaign referred to her vehicle as “her Scooby van,” evoking the lovable madcap crew of the cartoon series. This could be considered a cute little affectation, until you realize that she campaigned in a van in her 2000 Senate race, and for the same reason: to appear more relatable (the Secret Service reportedly referred to that vehicle, too, as the Scooby-Doo van). Hillary Clinton has been reintroducing herself to the public for so long that even her manufactured stabs at authenticity aren’t entirely new. Of course, the image she is trying to live down is the Hillary of the “Saturday Night Live” sketches, whose calling card is her gratingly insincere laugh and her cringe-inducing blatant calculations. It is her curse as a politician of stamina and determination, but not of natural grace, that her maneuvers to reveal her “real” self always feel like obvious maneuvers. To say that she lacks the light touch is almost as much of an understatement as saying her husband is not a monk.