It seems likely that the diner crying episode of Senator Clinton was contrived. The Senator prefigured and justified it the night before, and commented upon in such odd detail right after that it seems implausible that the whole thing was spontaneous. (We understand that most women will not agree with our analysis — after all, the technique worked, but please dwell on her statement the day before the episode, and consider if Mrs. Clinton’s characterization of herself as “too emotional” on the campaign trail rings true at all except for the incident the next day.) Moreover, the First Family has publicly employed acting coaches in the past. Finally, many media outlets have said that the tears were the key to her victory. And a politician committed to victory will do almost anything to achieve it. Guardian:

The emotional moment in a cafe on the eve of last night’s poll was widely credited today for bringing women voters back to the Clinton…Clinton took 46% of the women’s vote against 34% for Obama, exit polls showed; and women turned out to vote in greater numbers than men making up 57% of the electorate. That participation, and the demonstration of sympathy for Clinton, succeeded in halting Obama’s insurgent campaign in its tracks.

The set up. This was what Senator Clinton said the night before the tears, presaging her performance, and going out of her way to justify it in advance. Please consider if you would have applied the phrases “too emotional” and “passionate and carried away” to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign performance except for what she did the very next day:

It’s that difficult position that a woman candidate is in, because if you get too emotional, that undercuts you. A man can cry. We know that. Lots of our leaders have cried but, you know, a woman, that’s a different kind of dynamic. You know, I may get a little passionate and carried away from the time, and maybe somebody says, “Well, you know, women shouldn’t do that.” Well, I disagree with that. It may take some getting used to because we haven’t had a woman president…

The performance, truly outstanding in execution:

The post-mortem, self-congratulatory and telltale geeky in nature (“5:30pm, meet last voter; 10:30am, shed tears in diner”):

Well, I think that the whole sequence of events starting from the debates through the last voter I talked to about 5:30 on Tuesday night, because, you’re right, there was a feeling on the part of a lot of voters in New Hampshire that they were getting to know me. I mean, that’s what the New Hampshire primary process is about. There is just this extraordinary feeling that I had, in the incident you refer to where, you know, we were all in it together. I was doing my part to try to tell people what I wanted our country to be like, and when the woman said to me, “Well, how do you do that?” I really felt touched by that, and I think we did connect at a very, you know, personal level.

Mrs. Clinton is perhaps an overrated politician, but she seems more surely an underrated actress. The family seems to have come a long way in its acting skills since the clumsy Ron Brown performance of a decade ago. (Mrs. Clinton’s questioner also seems to be a very interesting person, by the way, and she was invited to the venue at which she asked her famous question by the co-chair of Senator Clinton’s campaign.)

(Question: was it the Thomasons, they of “Designing Women” and the famously bad acting of Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky speech, who taught the Senator the fundamental “waterworks factory” stagecraft of crying on cue — a technique said to be very “useful in everyday life“? If so, they did an excellent job and deserve a great deal of credit.)

Of course, we may be wrong about this entire scenario — but you have to admit, the ambition and past practices of the family in question make it very plausible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 12:10 am and is filed under art, culture, business, Democrats, General, MSM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.