The presidential song-and-dance show

Hillary Clinton danced the nae nae with Ellen Degeneres and DJ Stephen “tWitch” Boss last week, apparently figuring that brains and experience alone won’t get her to the White House.

No, our candidates must exhibit humor, compassion, soul, a penchant for the cuddly and even a smidgen of human frailty.

That means lousy impersonations on national TV, as when Jeb Bush mimicked Donald Trump on the new Stephen Colbert show.

Or they can tear up like Vice President Joe Biden, who discussed his son’s death as he was sandwiched among Colbert’s monologue, country music star Toby Keith and the host’s adroitly cutting chat with the impassive boss of the ride-hailing app Uber.

There’s little remove between the personal and public, even if there’s ample doubt about how much even grinning pandering impacts voters.

Clinton is an intriguing case study, given who she is, where she’s been and how she strains to adapt to the new campaign dictates.

She danced on the day she gave a solid (if belated) defense of the Iran nuclear deal at the Brookings Institution. A question and answer session was especially impressive and underscored her foreign policy chops even as she was beset by apparently awful allergies.

She was as serious as on a bleak, wet day in 1999 when she and President Clinton went tent to tent in a Turkish town ravaged by earthquake. I was with them as the lone print pool reporter.

“Jim, get your feet off that bed, this is their home,” she snapped at me (correctly) as I moved my muddy running shoes.

There was nothing contrived there, though we are always given to find a large dose of the inauthentic in Clinton.

“Part of it is stylistic, and to a degree unfair,” says Bill Clinton biographer David Maraniss, who’s also author of the new, “Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story.”

“She speaks like a careful lawyer in court rather than as a friend in the neighborhood,” he says. “But another part of it is purposefully encrusted calculation built up over years and decades of defensiveness.

“One has to seem open and optimistic or freewheeling and incautious and un-P.C. to come across in this culture as genuine and Hillary is none of those. . . and not nearly as good an actor as her husband. She quite literally can’t carry a tune and can also seem figuratively tone deaf.”

That further explains the concise, harsh response by David Axelrod, who is the former top political strategist for President Obama, to a New York Times article disclosing plans for her to exhibit greater spontaneity, humor and “heart.”

The story, he tweeted, felt like it came from The Onion, the satirical rag.

And what difference does any of this prancing and mimicking make?

Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, wrote last week, “Candidate perceptions are not a good predictor of the ultimate election outcome, especially this early.”

Yes, we vote for people we like, but that doesn’t mean we pick Presidents who we want to go on a weekend retreat or canoeing in Colorado with them.

“In the heat of the campaign, we tend to find reason to support candidates who share our party affiliation or seem to have a good record in office (and to oppose candidates who do not),” Nyhan wrote.

“Party, issue and ideology matter more than anything,” said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist.

Does personality matter a tad more in a primary, where everybody is in the same party and has roughly similar ideologies? Yes, but even then it’s at most a tiebreaker in a close race.

Consultants play a role as they as they plot new strategies in a fragmented media marketplace, including pushing clients onto soft TV shows.

Did dancing with Ellen win Clinton any votes? Did Bush’s nervous, halting Colbert spot cost him any votes?

“I doubt it matters at all,” said Sabato.

Dancing with Ellen, crying with Colbert