Branding Hillary:
The Optic Downs of Campaigning

I’m told I should identify with Hillary because she’s also a woman, and that’s reason enough to vote for her. I disagree. If not for the same hips, I couldn’t identify with her in any way. We’re not at all alike. Maybe she, too, would like to go home, kick off the heels, take a hot bath, watch a few eps of “Love It Or List It,” and go to bed. But that’s not what she’s doing.

The very thought of having your face plastered with makeup every single day for speeches, TV appearances, rallies, debates, and interviews, is positively chilling. Then she has to take off every pound of it at night, before her skin starts itching from makeup clogging her pores for hours. Does she get more makeup slathered on for whatever evening social obligations have been scheduled? Did they have to teach her how to control her blinking when the fake eyelashes cause discomfort? Rachel Maddow is still in the blinking stage but she’ll learn soon enough.

Then there’s the hair. Imagine having it highlighted, washed, trimmed, and generally messed with by a stylist, every single day. No respite. And you just know that the media is salivating to make headlines with “Didn’t Hil's hair look really crappy on Meet The Press”? Bernie claims he never combs his hair at all. Trump? Well, there’s that yellow hamster on his head.

As to Hillary's clothes, she may hate the outfit that was laid out for her, but she trudges on and wears it anyway. Who picks out those necklaces. No fun talkin with those those 5-pound brass balls hanging around your neck.

Hillary sometimes sounds gravelly, like a can full of pissed-off pebbles is stuck in her throat; she soldiers on anyway, whether she feels like it or not. Would we vote for her if she sounded soft and feminine like, say, Marilyn Monroe? Or confident and seductive, if she laughed like Julia Roberts? If either of those stars had to sit in front of a committee of scaby, snarky old men with fake hair and be insulted and grilled for 11 hours straight, or have to fight one whacko opponent simultaneously with a second, raging one, do you still think they’d sound sultry and seductive? Hillary earned that gravelly voice. It should be in the Smithsonian.

I’ve done alot of research and conclude that the personality and humor she’s known for among her friends, just doesn’t show when she’s campaigning; she’s all business. No, I’m not like Hillary. I couldn’t run the country and I think she could. Besides, I’d never have the courage she has in displaying that big H logo that could easily stand for the one thing we have in common: Hips.


© Maggie Van Ostrand
"A Balloon In Cactus" May 26, 2016 column

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