I was watching CNN last night (which is something I don’t recommend unless you supplement it with healthy doses of independent news sources) and reveling in the fact that Obama really did it. He clinched this thing and I couldn’t be happier. But it got me to asking myself, “What was it about her?” What made the campaign and the lady herself become so repugnant to me? And it dawned on me that the thing about Hillary is this:

She was running a marketing campaign.

I remember when Gore ran in 2000. I didn’t vote for him. I voted for Nader. It wasn’t because of his policies which, retrospectively, would have been pretty damn good in many respects compared to what we got. It was the whole “Wooden Gore” thing. He was a puppet. I’d watch him talk and it was like you could sense the pollsters and the PR guys standing off camera with cue cards. Same with Kerry in 2004, though I did vote for him in spite of that. Same with Hillary.

What Hillary was doing was running a marketing campaign. She might as well have been trying to sell a new toothpaste. Like Gore, like Kerry and like her husband (who, unlike the other three, was very good at it), these old school politicians are essentially just manipulating people. They’ve tested their talking points and their sound bites. They’ve been told what will play well and to stick to that script. And they actually do!

It’s what has turned me off to American politics for my whole life. It’s also what made Hillary vote to authorize the war in Iraq. Of course, it’s never been acknowledged as such by her but everyone knows she was planning her future White House run way back then. And everyrone back then knew that, according to PR metrics, voting against that war was political suicide. So rather than commit political suicide, she listened to the pollsters and sent the boys off to get killed instead. There’s no doubt in my mind that she was smart enough to know that the war itself was a bad idea from day one. Every smart person who had access to a reasonable amount of information knew that. And Hillary is smart. But polls were polls and they said, “do it.”

As a thinking person, it’s hard not to find the whole process repugnant. Marketers don’t think we’re smart. They don’t respect us. They want to manipulate us. That’s their job – figure out what makes us tick and use it to get us to perform a desired action. Essentially, marketing is just mass manipulation and that’s exactly what Hillary’s campaign felt like. And to the credit of the American people, it just didn’t work that well

Nader, implausible though he was as a candidate, at least spoke to us like grown-ups. Even Pat Buchanan does, though his policies are abhorrent. Gore’s an amazing case study though. Look at him today. He went off to the woods somewhere, grew his beard for a while and along the way rediscovered his voice. He came back a changed man and a genuine man. It’s not really that he changed though. It’s that he came back with nothing to lose and finally started to speak with his own voice, not as the puppet who ran in 2000. When you hear him now, he’s smart. He’s very smart! And likable because of it – not in spite of it. In 2000, he basically ran his campaign as a dumb version of himself. He tried to be the Gore they thought America would want and it was a bizzarre spectacle. I have no doubt that if he had run as true self in 2000 he would have won. Lord knows he’s won everything else a human can win since then (and deservedly so). But he followed the Bill Clinton formula and lost because he seemed inhuman.

The magic of Obama is that he grasped all of this and ran his campaign on it. He kept it real. And he won!

While you may or may not dismiss my opinion as pure conjecture, I should point out that there’s actually a historical background to the point I’m making. Politicians haven’t been using PR and marketing tactics since day one. It’s a relatively new thing and, in presidential politics, has a very clear starting point, which is in 1994, in the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term. At that time, his approvals were horrible and he was headed towards losing the office in two years. He went to a man named Dick Morris, a PR guy who was a very adept at polling, and basically asked him to run the show… to use PR and spin to figure out how to get Clinton back to popularity. It worked marvelously.

That’s when presidential politics and PR became one and the same. And that is the thing about Hillary.