Chipotle gets gaggled
Wow! Hillary Clinton actually ate a burrito!
On her way to Iowa in a van she called “Scooby Doo,” Hillary Clinton stopped for lunch at a Chipotle restaurant outside Toledo.
It was “historic,” said Newsweek. She carried her own tray, gushed The New York Times. “We’ve never seen her eat a burrito before,” marveled Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News.
Politico wrote a story about “the everyday people who made Hillary Clinton’s burrito bowl.” The subtext, I gather, was how thrilling that must have been for the peasants.
I hope they were thrilled, because Hillary didn’t leave a tip.
Earlier that day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would sell anti-aircraft missiles to Iran. Had there been a real journalist in the gaggle at Chipotle, Ms. Clinton might have been asked what this portends for her much ballyhooed “reset” of relations with Russia. Russian experts Graham Allison and Dmitri Simes think Russia and America are “stumbling toward war.”
To avoid such questions, Hillary announced her candidacy in a tweet, a news release and a video rather than in the customary news conference.
“She fought children and families her whole career,” the news release said. I think that’s true, but it isn’t what Team Clinton meant to say. Glitches like dropping that “for” suggest a campaign not ready for prime time, said elections expert Sean Trende.
Hillary spoke for just 37 seconds in her two-minute-18-second video and said nothing about any issue, noted MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. The video is “relentlessly, insultingly vapid,” said liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus.
NBC News political director Chuck Todd praised the video because “it had every part of the Democratic coalition represented.” But it was the “spontaneity” of her road trip that earned Hillary’s campaign rollout an “A,” he said.
The “listening tour” — right down to the name of her van — is a reprise of what Ms. Clinton did when she ran for the Senate in 2000.
Every event in Iowa — where Hillary met mostly with small, prescreened groups — was staged and scripted.
In the first, three “ordinary Iowans” she chatted with in a cafe were Democratic campaign operatives driven there by her staff.
Before their meeting with Ms. Clinton, Democratic leaders in Council Bluffs had their cell phones and cameras confiscated.
While Hillary met with a pre-selected six students at Kirkwood Community College, others were locked down in their classrooms, which ensured no unvetted student would ask an unscripted question.
“We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all,” Ms. Clinton said.
But not until after she’s raised a billion or two for her campaign. To raise that much, you have to carry a lot of water for crony capitalists. So some doubt Hillary’s populist rhetoric reflects a genuine change of heart. We know she doesn’t mean it, some of her friends on Wall Street say.
Hillary is running exactly the way an unlikable candidate with stale, unpopular ideas, a record devoid of accomplishment and a closet full of scandals should campaign. If more members of the news media were doing their jobs, she couldn’t get away with it. Because so many are shills, she thinks she can.
Wherever Ms. Clinton goes, a huge gaggle of reporters now tags along. Because they’ve had nothing of substance to report, more Americans learned she didn’t leave a tip at Chipotle, fibbed about her grandparents and parked her van in a handicapped spot. That’s hurt her more than the tough questions she’s ducking, wrote Liz Peek of The Fiscal Times.
The spectacle of the media horde chasing madly after her van was so humiliating for journalists that even Chuck Todd criticized it. Hillary “swung and missed” on her campaign launch, he now says.
Mr. Todd had been razzed mercilessly on Twitter for saying Hillary’s van trip was “spontaneous.” Journalists who lack the integrity to do their jobs may do them on occasion just to keep from being laughed at.