Hillary put your CV away and remember, it’s not always about you

‘I feel,’ she begins. ‘I know,’ she states. It’s always about her, her, her [Hillary]. With Obama, it’s never about him. It’s about hope and history. About turning the nation’s ‘sorrowful racial narrative’ into a shared triumph...

YOU can’t get away from it. Even if you wanted to. And you’d be a fool to want to. If you’re in America at the moment, the fun is earwigging on an unprecedented conversation about the presidential primaries.

Standing in front of a shelf in Borders bookstore, two teenagers thumb through calendars devoted to how awful George W Bush is. One of them points to a headline saying Bush is on the way out, and mutters that anybody would be an improvement. The other makes a “Maybe, maybe not”, noise. The first looks outraged. “President Huckabee?” he says, turning the surname into something that fell out of an old episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. Older shoppers share shamed smiles: of course we would never reject a man based on his surname, but still…

In the Goodwill store, where poor Americans buy other people’s castoffs, a woman with a walker asks a male helper what he thinks of Obama’s Iowa victory. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah,” she says back, thumping the walker a few steps forward. “95% white,” he says, referring to the Iowan population. “Yeah,” she says, breathless from the effort of mobility. “Got the young ‘uns,” he says. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah,” he says back.

Lucid, it isn’t. Meaningful, however, it certainly is. The Obama phenomenon rendered even the New York Times less than coherent, this weekend. Under a front-page photograph of people straining to reach his hands, the paper noted, with energetic imprecision, that “he is something unusual in American politics”.

It’s the “something unusual” that’s driving his opponents nuts. If they could identify it and kill it, they could get back to manageable tangibles like spend and policy and polls. Hillary’s making stabs at identifying his key disqualifier. He’s naive, she suggests. He’s a flip-flopper, she accuses. He’s inconsistent. He’s inexperienced. Of course, he’s got charm and talks about change, but where are the specifics?

This approach actually harms Hillary while leaving Obama undented, making her sound like a bossy aunt, smiling fiercely while she makes you eat up your greens. Her spinners were out in force after Saturday night’s debate, claiming she’d made this point forcefully or that point strongly, and that she was consistent on policy.

They were right. But the way the debates and pre-caucus appearances are analysed tends to focus on performance, rather than outcome. On points scored, rather than impact on undecided voters, as pollster Frank Luntz observes in his book, Words That Work.

“The news media naturally tend to place great importance on policy prescriptions and legislative proposals because they are concrete, specific, and substantive,” he says. “Reporter questioning is primarily focused on what the candidate believes rather than who the candidate is. The unspoken reality, though, is that the vast majority of Americans don’t vote based on particular issues at all.”

They vote on how the candidate makes them feel about themselves. About who they perceive the candidate to be. They don’t keep score of debating points. They either connect, emotionally, with a candidate, or they don’t. In this regard, the fact that John McCain, despite unpopular policy stances (like keeping the troops in Iraq) and a virtual meltdown last year, is still in contention is due, more than anything else, to his capacity to connect in a real way with voters — particularly Republicans.

Hillary’s advisers keep missing this. They figure that if they amputate the dislikeable bits of her, people will see the “real” Hillary. Voters don’t like her scripted speeches? OK, ditch the speech and have her answer questions spontaneously. Voters don’t like her, period? Get her to be funny about being disliked. Iowa didn’t like all the old fogeys surrounding her in the pictures? Get rid of the wrinklies and surround her with twentysomethings. Voters may be getting attached to Bill all over again but not to his wife? Less of Bill.

Amputation of the worst can certainly improve a candidate’s image, and New Hampshire may deliver a payoff for the Clinton camp’s clipping and culling. But in communication terms, they haven’t got near to solving their clever candidate’s problems, partly because their expertise about the campaign process gets in the way of whatever emotional intelligence they have. Some of her advisers claim their game plan is to show how, when it comes to the actual election, Hillary will withstand Republican attacks better than a newcomer, because she’s had 30 years of Republican attacks and is still standing.

Now, that kind of thinking comes from Mensa-size brains that don’t get out much. Or notice simple communications barriers their wonderful candidate erects around herself every time she opens her mouth. “I think,” she says. “I feel,” she begins. “I know,” she With Obama, it’s never about him. It’s about hope and history. About turning the nation’s “sorrowful racial narrative” into a shared triumph. On the rare occasions he deals with his own life, it’s fascinating to see the inevitable progress of his discourse, starting, as it has to, with “I,” then moving to “we” and always ending up with “you”.

Here’s an example: “I was raised by a single mom. We had neither wealth nor privilege. All the odds — All the odds — said I shouldn’t be standing here. But I am because of love and education and lots of hope. That’s what we can stand for in four days. That’s what you can stand for.”

The contrast between the communication styles of the two candidates could not have been more sharply delineated than in the aftermath of the Iowa caucus. Hillary was on TV and radio immediately. She looked energetic, buoyant, up for it. Undefeated, undefeatable. She talked about what she was going to do in the following few days. She was going to criss-cross Iowa, and wherever two or more people were gathered together, she was going to talk to them. She was going to reach out to young people, particularly. She was going to win in New Hampshire.

Obama didn’t talk about organisational stuff. In a disused aircraft hangar where two-and-a-half thousand supporters were gathered in frozen enthusiasm, he jokingly took the sting out of a Clinton jibe that he’d lusted after the presidency in kindergarten. Then he used a Martin Luther King phrase about “the fierce urgency of now”. Finally, he directed his words to his audience and their potential.

“If you will work with me, like you’ve never worked before, then we will win,” he told them. “And we will win America. And then we will change the world.”

It may not work. Tomorrow will reinforce or retard Obama’s progress. But his soaring non-specific rhetoric, so far, has been a lot more emotionally engaging than Hillary flogging her CV.

Sooner or later, her campaign will learn the Aldous Huxley truth: “Experience is not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you.”

And they’ll stop trying to woo voters on the basis of a resumé.