Ann McFeatters: Hillary’s ‘reboot’ aims to reverse slide

WASHINGTON – She’s a grandmother. For years she was the most popular woman in the world. She wrote two books. She lived in a fish bowl for eight years. Her husband had a very public affair. She has cried, laughed and fumed before TV cameras. She has given hundreds of speeches.

But almost a third of the way into her second run for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her handlers and strategists have decided voters don’t really know her and are embarking on a new tack. In the trade, it’s a “campaign reboot.”

It’s the new softer, warmer, funnier, more candid, revealing, self-effacing, humble Hillary that, apparently, the world has been seeking for a long time.

No matter that she is running for the toughest job in the world. No matter that she defended for years her vote to go to war in Iraq because she feared that being against the war or admitting she’d made a mistake would make her look too soft.

So now everybody’s favorite comedians Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon are her new best friends. Hillary, who had 36 hairstyles while in the White House, is sticking to one style, although she now self-effacingly admits that “the hair is real (the color isn’t).” So now the master of the sarcastic one-liner – “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” – will be approachable and less Viking-like in her approach to political battle. So now the campaign will dispense with rope lines to corral nosy reporters at her events.

It’s all because Donald Trump, the bombastic New York real estate tycoon whose egotism tells him he should be president, and Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont whose populism has put him ahead of her in New Hampshire and close on her heels in Iowa, are getting the attention. She is getting the blowback.

With too many Americans telling pollsters they don’t like her perceived feeling of “entitlement” to be president and the widespread belief that she has run a bad campaign so far, Hillary World has acknowledged that it’s time to start over as a “non-establishment” and more accessible candidate.

Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, in a rare half-hour televised national interview with Clinton, asked her how she feels when likely Republican and Democratic voters in a Quinnipiac Poll used words such as “liar,” “untrustworthy” and “crooked” to describe her. Well, said Hillary, “It certainly doesn’t make me feel good.”

But by the time the campaign is over, she says, Americans will trust her to be their advocate for them. Meanwhile, everything she has said about using a private email server while secretary of state will be proved true. Despite her bad choice, she insists most of her emails have been preserved for history. But it took a couple of days before Hillary would apologize for the email situation to David Muir of ABC, and the brouhaha is far from over.

The campaign’s perspective is that although Clinton’s unfavorability ratings have soared since July, she is still polling higher than any Republican candidate.

Nonetheless, the perception that more Americans increasingly feel Clinton is not “genuine” is hurting her in the polls and giving fodder to her enemies, who have long been overstuffed when it comes to feeding in the Hillary trough.

Just after her campaign aides signaled the softer, funnier Hillary, she gave her toughest speech yet defending the Iran nuclear deal, saying she’d go to war if Iran violates it.

She also still has to go before Congress to answer questions about those pesky emails. On Oct. 13 she debates her fellow Democrats running to be president. Will we see the combative Hillary, the wonky Hillary or the sweet, warm Hillary? All of the above? It’s so exciting.

As the next stage of her revamped campaign began, she headed off to another event. “So off we go – joyfully!” she said, flinging her hands in the air as if she just didn’t care. Then she added, “Let’s get some joy going, guys.”