So the new Hillary brand has been unveiled. She is a regular modern woman sensitive to our regular modern concerns. She wants only to be of service, to champion our shared causes. She drives around Iowa and New Hampshire to chat with us about today's challenges. She may or may not be married. It's hard to tell. Husbands are so incidental anymore.
People who know Hillary Clinton well--and there are about a half-dozen left in Arkansas--say the rest of us simply do not understand her defining religious faith and personal warmth.
They say we, and she, are victims of the public caricature drawn by our trivializing and distorting institutions of politics and media.
They are right. We do not understand.
When I was doubting a year or more ago that Clinton actually would make the presidential race that she announced Sunday, friends of hers said I simply didn't grasp John Wesley and Methodism and Hillary's childhood-ingrained commitment to its principles.
Wesley was an 18th Century Anglican theologian who is credited with inspiring the Methodist denomination. He advanced, among other things, methodical discipline and a commitment to social consciousness.
Perhaps his most famous quotation is this one, which Hillary's friends cited to explain that certainly she would seek the presidency: "Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can."
Clinton is famously disciplined. She is no-nonsense in her public style and manner, leading some to judge her--by the unavoidable superficiality of public image--to be cold or calculating or ill-humored.
Her public life from young adulthood in a kind of self-chosen exile in Arkansas has been devoted to social consciousness and causes--children's protections, women's equality, education, health-care reform and a general progressivism.
There simply has always been a heavy and even burdensome seriousness attending this woman, at least in her public persona. And, in her mind, the seriousness was always forced on her by the inferiority of others--by their lack of discipline, or their jealousy of her husband, or their taking advantage of her husband, or their stereotypical prejudice against women, or their vast right-wing conspiracy, or their simple failings.
So she offers a new context--practically husbandless, for one thing.
The rebranding reminds me of Kentucky Fried Chicken's worry about "fried" in the modern world and becoming "KFC." Bill is the "fried" that has been excised. Now everybody in Little Rock goes to Chick-fil-A. I don't think Arkansas is a targeted state for its former first lady. She won't need us. She never did.
So where, pray tell, is that private warmth? It's where private warmth is always found--in private, or so I'm advised.
Relaxed with trusted friends, Hillary can be great fun with a robust laugh and a sensitive and engaging personal touch, they say.
Now her campaign will seek to re-introduce her as the warm person she always has been, and as a woman whose public seriousness merely reflects and confirms that, as ever, she seeks simply to do all the good she can.
Her limited rollout of Sunday afternoon was smart. She released a video in which regular Americans told of their exciting changes and challenges--a new job, a baby coming, a post-college job, gay marriage, retirement and thus "reinvention" for a baby boomer.
Not until the video is three-fourths finished does Hillary appear to say she's embarking on an adventure of her own--she's running for president--and that people in the middle class need the champion she hopes to become for them.
The message is one of doing good works, of a warm connection with regular people, and of a Hillary that is of the moment, not stagnantly banished to the fame or infamy or entitlement of yesteryear.
The only thing such contrived efforts have shown in her before is a lack of ease or authenticity.
You can't force your real self. Most likely, it has been revealed naturally already. Most likely you, like so many others, are complex, both the warm person of strict faith some know and the cold calculator and huffy scoffer others see.
Even so, they say the mature among us can stay relevant in the changing world only by adaptation.
The ancient newspaper columnist does a little blogging, a little TV, some YouTube, a lot of tweeting, some Facebooking. And that gets him to 2006.
Hillary must achieve 2016. She can't be bothering with Fallon. She needs to be on Kimmel, though not in person, but by Meerkat, except that Meerkat was last month. It's Periscope now.
She needs to live-stream the virtual church of John Wesley.
Actually, she might simply live-stream everything. That way, we could check in with her on our smart watches from time to time, whenever we needed a dose of real warmth and good humor or a serving of KFC. Grilled, of course.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/14/2015