Hillary Clinton's opening campaign pitch
This article originally appeared on Slate.
People's Champion. That's Hillary Clinton's first crack at explaining why she's running for president. (What she once called "the hard question.") The campaign video she released announcing her candidacy on Sunday was all about the people--expectant parents, job seekers, a same-sex couple on the verge of marriage, and women of all ages and ethnicities. This was a celebration of what National Journal's Ron Brownstein called the "coalition of the ascendant"--the young people, minorities, and college-educated whites--especially women--who helped give Barack Obama his two victories and who Democrats think are the key to a string of future presidential victories. It was such a play to this group that Business Week's Josh Green said the ad should have ended with a tag line that read "Ron Brownstein is responsible for the content of this message."
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Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it official on Sunday that she is running for president in 2016 in a 2-minute video...
The online spot was a departure from the recent vintage of announcement videos where the candidate is hard to distinguish from an action hero, ready to solve America's problems: foreign, domestic, and extra-terrestrial.
The Clinton video--which is the opening argument of her campaign--did exclude some people. She makes it clear that she is not running for all the people. As she wrote on Twitter, "Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion." She is not promising to be the champion of "every American" but rather "everyday Americans." In that grammatical choice lies the campaign: a fight for the people who have been left out of the economic recovery.
In order to put the voters center stage, Clinton doesn't appear until more than 90 seconds into the video. By then, all the voters she hopes to stitch into her coalition have seen a version of themselves. In the most recent CBS poll, Clinton gets low marks for honesty--only 42 percent of the country thinks she is honest and trustworthy--and her favorability is low (only 26 percent have a favorable opinion of her). For the viewers who have these chilly views of her, this opening gambit was a warmth-graft, associating her candidacy with superbly shot images of attractive, striving Americans. It was the visual equivalent of motherhood and apple pie wrapped in the American dream.
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Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer, CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes, and CBS News political director John Dickerson join CBSN...
Connecting Clinton with people plays to her strengths. A strong majority (56 percent) believes that she cares about people like them.