Guardian: 5 Ways for Hillary to Recapture Her Cool

[Divernan]

(Headline)
Hillary Clinton
Can Hillary Clinton avoid the fate of Mitt Romney? Five ways to recapture her cool
(Subheadline)

Her email controversy and a perceived lack of the ‘personal touch’ look ready to derail yet another campaign – but we know how she can get it back on track

God, Hillary Clinton is a stuffy old suit, isn’t she? Everyone knows that. She’s out of touch, she lacks the “personal touch”, and she hasn’t got “the common touch” either.

Over the past few weeks it has become accepted wisdom among political commentators that Clinton is 2016’s Mitt Romney. She is distant and lacks a sense of humour. She’s stiff! She’s wooden and overly cautious!

Basically Clinton is like a real-life Pinocchio, trotting about on stage with rigid arms and legs, except she is voiced by a bad actor who can’t do jokes and is ill-advisedly flippant about email disclosure.

But it wasn’t always this way. Remember that phone picture where she was wearing sunglasses? She was cool then.

[Divernan]

1. Some specific suggestions from the Guardian

(1) Stage another meme-inspiring picture
Clinton looked like a bad-ass when she was reading her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses. It went viral. All her team need do is come up with another picture of her looking powerful and cool. She could be pictured zip-lining with a knife between her teeth, while reading her phone and wearing sunglasses. She could be pictured jabbing a punchbag – while reading her phone and wearing sunglasses.

(2)Drive a tank
It didn’t work for Michael Dukakis when he tried it in 1988, but this is a different time. In 2015 tanks are more popular than ever. You can barely walk down the street without seeing some Brooklyn hipster zooming past, long hair flowing in the breeze as he drives his M1 Abrams battle tank through the centre of Williamsburg. Behold its Burlington composite armour glinting in the sunlight. Marvel at its 120mm M256A1 smoothbore gun scanning from side-to-side, searching for targets. Clinton in a tank is a surefire hit.

(3) Comment on a storyline from a popular television show
How about that Game of Thrones, eh? Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard even wrote a column about it, after all. And did you see Deadliest Catch last night? The size of that fish! The Walking Dead! They’re dead but they still walk around! These are all good things to say to people.

(4) Lift weights Prior to October 2012, Paul Ryan was a low-life nobody who no one had ever heard of. He’d been plucked from obscurity by Mitt Romney, who had been struck by Ryan’s sheep-herding qualities on a remote Montana farm, to run as the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Then everything changed: he was photographed for Time magazine lifting weights and looking supercool in a backwards baseball cap. Ryan did not become vice-president, but fast-forward four years and he is chairman of the House ways and means committee and is recognised nationwide as a man who lifts weights and looks supercool in a backwards baseball cap.