Hillary The Hatter
Time Magazine looks at how Hillary Clinton lost her title of Her Inevitableness and notices how Clinton has been trying on one hat after another in Iowa, trying to gain traction. The frantic scramble to find the right message and the right image for Clinton resembles a mad tea party.
"She has never really been ahead here in Iowa," says Arthur B. Sanders, a politics professor at Drake University in Des Moines and author of Losing Control: Presidential Elections and the Decline of Democracy. "Her national lead made it easy to assume she would win here as well, especially since her national campaign gave off an image of her 'inevitable' victory. And a national press that had not spent time here did not really understand how different the situation was here."
Clinton has also shaken up her message in recent weeks, trying on different hats: angry Hillary; warm-and-fuzzy mommy Hillary; commander-in-chief Hillary; insurgent change-candidate Hillary. "It's a very close race in Iowa, and quite naturally, the Clinton campaign has decided to throw in everything it's got, plus the kitchen sink," says Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia?s Center for Politics. "She?s both the candidate of change and the candidate of experience, the candidate with a hard side and a soft side, and the candidate of the establishment past and the progressive future. Maybe voters are getting confused, or maybe she?s patching together just enough voters to win or tie. We'll all find out together on January 3rd."
Her new message, to be rolled out after the holiday is "Time to Pick a President." Which falls a bit flat since it really is time to pick a candidate first. But then, it is all a bit mad, isn't it?
