Jonah Goldberg‘s latest column posted at National Review Online focuses on the large-scale effort to mold Hillary Clinton into a successful presidential candidate.
“Is Hillary Rodham Clinton a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Chipotle burrito bowl? A can of Bud or a bottle of Blue Moon? JCPenney or J. Crew?”
That was the opening question of a front-page Washington Post story on Clinton’s effort to figure out her “brand.” To that end, she has recruited a team of corporate marketing specialists to “help imagine Hillary 5.0.”
“It’s exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal,” Peter Sealey, a longtime corporate marketing strategist, told the Post. “She needs to use everything a brand has: a dominant color, a logo, a symbol. . . . The symbol of a Mercedes is a three-pointed star. The symbol of Coca-Cola is the contour bottle. The symbol of McDonald’s is the golden arches. What is Clinton’s symbol?”
A columnist less charitable — and less constrained by the rules of publishing decorum — might be tempted to suggest some fitting symbols for Bill Clinton. But for Hillary, that’s a tougher question.
Which is why the Hillary Industrial Complex is setting up a Manhattan Project to answer the question, “Who should Hillary be this time?”
They’ll have their work cut out for them. More than any other politician in American life today, Hillary Clinton is an ironic figure. When she does or says anything, friends and foes alike ask, “Why did she do that?” “What was she thinking?” No one takes Clinton at face value because it seems that, after decades of public life, even Clinton doesn’t really know who she is — or at least who she should be this time around.
