Hillary arrives in Iowa ... and it was staged and hard-to-follow

Hillary Clinton arrived in Iowa. She came in a strange road trip from the East Coast, in an armored SUV with her Secret Service contingent.

Donald Trump came in “Trump I,” his excellent, lavish private jet.

Rand Paul needs to come and so does Marco Rubio, and it would be best if they rent a car at Des Moines International Airport.

My wife asked me the other day when we flew to Canada why it’s “International.” We flew to Minneapolis for our international flight. I don’t know if there are any flights from Des Moines to a foreign country.  The map does not show any foreign venues. International apparently means you can make connections at other airports to fly to other countries.

But I digress.

Hillary Clinton came in third in the last Iowa caucuses when she ran for president. Obama, John Edwards before the scandal, then Hillary.

She has been told by everyone that she needs to commit fully to Iowa.

Gov. Terry Branstad advises Hillary and all other caucus contenders to go “the full Grassley.” When you live in Iowa you know that means hit all 99 counties at least once and if possible, multiple times.

The reason is that we want candidates for president to meet lots of local “folk” in cafes, grocery stores, churches, malls, Casey’s, Kum ’N’ Go’s, VFW halls, Rotary Clubs, Lions, Kiwanis, and every other venue that still exists in small Iowa towns.  

As they say, “Iowans won’t vote for anyone unless they’ve met them face-to-face at least three times.”

I watched every moment of Mrs. Clinton’s Iowa adventure. I thought it was jerky and incomprehensible. There was no “story,” no “sequence” of events, no coherent message.

It was what I call, “Throwing the spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.”

A lot of, if you will, Clinton’s campaign spaghetti was thrown against all kinds of walls. A Chipotle restaurant (I guess that was not spaghetti, so maybe she threw a taco), at Kirkwood Community College, a cafe, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, a sudden “pop up” at the Statehouse. I have probably missed some other places she stopped. Oh yeah, I saw her sticking her head through a window like at a drive-in or a pharmacy, but I honestly have no idea where or what that was.

I was told that this was a “pilot project” testing the “soft rollout” of the “listening tour-type” campaign that they are trying to craft for the 2016 campaign.

The takeaway was that she thinks small businesses need to grow and we need more of them, people need to be making more at their job, education and children are important.

I also found out today that her campaign “… will accept political donations from lobbyists and political action committees.” I read that maybe they will separate out donations from countries that are controversial and have them go to some other entity of the Clinton Initiative, but honestly I’m not smart enough to sort all that out.

Apparently the campaign thinks Iowans will say, “Oh, well that’s much better! Now I can rest assured that Secretary/Senator Clinton won’t be getting ‘nasty’ money!”

At the end of her Iowa swing, news broke with video on ABC News that shows they parked her armored SUV at a handicapped parking spot in Council Bluffs.

They’ve also discovered that those “normal customers” in the Le Claire cafe were actually hand-picked Clinton supporters. In other words, they were “props.”

Nothing could be worse for Clinton since it all feeds into the narrative. The launch of Hillary Clinton’s campaign was ragged, jerky, staged, hard-to-follow, and did not connect with many of Iowa’s likely Democratic caucus participants who are the only group that really matters at this point.

My conclusion is that Clinton believes she’ll be the inevitable winner of the Iowa Caucuses, the nominee of her party, and therefore her focus is actually already on the November 2016 general election.
Steffen Schmidt is a political science professor at Iowa State University.

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