A More Personal Hillary Clinton Tries to Erase a Trust Deficit
There is the truth to the person. Hillary the person as people who have known her a long time would know, like family and friends, people who might have known her even she had never become a public figure.
The Republican surgeon that Trump defeated a few months earlier, his colleagues at John Hopkins said, "We don't recognize the person portrayed by the media."
That gap between the real person and that person's public image does not seem to go away even if tens of books might have been written about them, and the Internet is full of articles about them, and there is saturation coverage, and now there is social media. You can cut through old media and go straight to the people via social media and that image deficit is still there.
So there is the public private gap.
Being Bill Clinton's wife doesn't help. Bill Clinton said not long after he launched his career: "People either love me or they hate me, there is nothing in between."
Both ways you get exaggerated, inaccurate pictures. With Hillary people not only get a Dem, you also get a woman, and the culture's sexism takes wings. Besides, before Bill Clinton even Democratic presidents were all born with silver spoons. Bill Clinton faced regional as well as class biases. The power structure did not take too kindly to him.
So there's all that partisan mythologizing.
How do you handle this?
The Clinton campaign should go all over the country and all over the world and talk to everyone who ever spent more than 10 minutes with Hillary Clinton and record it all and put it all out on YouTube in one grand release of 10,000 hours.
Let people who have met her in person talk about her. Americans might be utterly surprised what people around the world say about her. She starts looking like an angel.
Like some Canadians said about Barack Obama years ago: "Send him over here!"
