Does this photo of Hillary Clinton change your opinion of her? Do you think it should?
It was featured pretty prominently today on Matt Drudge’s site and is getting a little bit of play around the blogosphere. One blog even called it “The Most Significant Photo of 2007″. Rush even had a pretty solid segment on it on his show today. I’ll bet that at some point we’ll see it come up somewhere on a newscast or some MSM publication.
The sad truth is that the photo will matter in this election, even though it shouldn’t. Rush hit the nail squarely on the head when he said,
When you see people who are, “Boy, they’re just really great,” but they can’t get anywhere because they just, for some reason, television doesn’t complement them. They don’t look well on it, they don’t handle it well, and it has an effect, regardless how smart they are, how brilliant their policy. This is one of the things that many people lament with the coming of television. You go back and look at presidents that we elected prior to TV, and presidents we elected after TV, and you will notice a huge difference. Do you think a bloated president could win? We had plenty of fat-guy presidents. Do you think one could get elected today? There’s not a prayer! There isn’t a prayer.
His entire monologue is worth reading because it says something that I believe we all think to some degree but we really don’t say. Whether we are willing to admit it or not, we will take a candidate’s appearance into account. We’ll spend some amount of time deciding whether the candidate looks tired or sickly or unfit or hale and healthy. It’s part of who we are as humans.
More after the jump.
I’ve looked at the photo and have made my decision. I don’t care. I realize that anyone can take a bad photo. Campaigning is a long, hard slog and when you do it in bitterly-cold weather over long days and too-short nights, when you’ve put on and taken off more makeup for television appearances in a week than the average Vegas stripper does in a month, you’re bound to look beat down and dragged out once in a while. It means exactly nothing, as far as I’m concerned.
So…will the photo matter? Sure it will. That’s the society we have nowadays, no matter how much I dislike it. Some folks are going to see a Haggard Hillary and go for someone more blow-dried and primped. That, I think, is a shame, because Senator Clinton is easily the smartest and toughest candidate the Democrats are fielding this election.
UPDATE: The Anchoress is of the same mind as I. So I know I’m on the right side.
[...] The Sundries Shack thinks that the “cold” picture of Hillary is a low blow. [...]
[...] Jimmie Bise: I don’t care. I realize that anyone can take a bad photo. Campaigning is a long, hard slog and when you do it in bitterly-cold weather over long days and too-short nights, when you’ve put on and taken off more makeup for television appearances in a week than the average Vegas stripper does in a month, you’re bound to look beat down and dragged out once in a while. It means exactly nothing, as far as I’m concerned. [...]
“because Senator Clinton is easily the smartest and toughest candidate the Democrats are fielding this election.”
This is part I hate the most. I really, really don’t want her to be President. Therefor I really don’t want her to win the Dem. nomination, since the nominee of one of the 2 major parties has at worst a good shot at being President. But, of the Dem candidates she is the only one that seems even vaguely likely to punch back if we get hit, which we will, as a test of our will, as soon as we get a new President. So I kind of have to want her to get the nomination. Worse yet, I can’t seem to pick a Republican that I like. Arrrrghhh!!!
Lucky for me Kansas is unlikely to matter by the time we select our delegates.
Martin
You really think she would strike back? I don’t. I think she is like her husband, who had plenty of opportunities to strike back and never did.
I think she is substantially more vicious than her husband. Additionally she would want to prove that as a woman she was not afraid to be aggressive.
Martin
Even in the cold sub freezing temp she looks better than the emaciated Obama. Gawd that man is ugly. Is he sick or something? He’s been looking malnourished lately. He reminds me of one of those Egyptian mummies after they take the rappings off to tell you the truth, where the leathery dark skin is stuck to the skeleton. Eww, gives me the chills just thinking about it.