Hillary Clinton campaign stresses how 'ordinary' she is

It would be interesting to know when Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that driving from New York to Iowa in a van nicknamed "Scooby" would make the former secretary of state seem more like an ordinary American.

What is more authentic, they must have thought, than a classic US road trip - with impromptu stops for a burrito bowl at Chipotle Mexican Grill and unscripted question and answer sessions with so-called "everyday Iowans" - to allow the Democratic frontrunner to reconnect with voters as she launched her second bid for the White House?

If "Hillary 1.0" was all about projecting strength and experience - with its famous ad asking voters who they wanted picking up the phone at 3am in the White House - "Hillary 2.0" is a true reboot, seeking to transform Mrs Clinton into a more approachable, down-to-earth leader.

But that is no easy feat when "Scooby" is actually a blacked-out Secret Service SUV, and the mere act of arriving at a community college triggers a media frenzy among the scores of journalists covering her campaign.

It raises the question of whether Mrs Clinton's team is overcorrecting for mistakes made during her crushing defeat by Barack Obama in 2008, when she was criticised for seeming aloof and out of touch.

It is a pernicious myth of US politics that most voters want to know their presidential candidates on a deeply personal level, strategists say. Personality matters but struggling families are more likely to be interested in how the next US president plans to jump-start stagnant wages, narrow the gap between the rich and poor and tackle extremist terrorist groups such as Isis than the fact that Mrs Clinton, apparently, drinks masala chai tea.

Rare among the current crop of candidates, she has already been in the public spotlight for more than two decades.

As First Lady, Mrs Clinton led an ill-fated push for universal healthcare. She was serving as a senator from New York when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, she clocked up nearly a million air miles en route to more than 100 countries.

But establishing a folksy rapport with voters - an art at which her husband excels - has never come naturally. In this, she is hardly alone.

Ed Miliband, the UK Labour leader fighting his own election battle, is frequently depicted as bumbling and wooden, unable to look normal eating a bacon sandwich. Mr Obama preferred soaring speeches to small talk with voters, while former presidential candidate Mitt Romney could never quite shed the caricature of an uncaring private equity mogul.

One puzzling aspect of Mrs Clinton's rebrand is that it has tacked away from what is possibly her greatest strength - her in-depth knowledge of a huge range of foreign and domestic policy issues.

On Tuesday, she began fleshing out the broad strokes of her 2016 platform: building a stronger economy, strengthening families and communities, reforming campaign finance and improving national security.

Aides say Mrs Clinton will roll out a full suite of policies in coming weeks. Meanwhile, she is emphasising a populist-tinged message designed to appeal to the Democratic party's progressive base.

"It's fair to say as you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favour of those already at the top," she said on Tuesday in Monticello, a small town in rural northeast Iowa. "There is something wrong when hedge-fund managers pay less in taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw."

With a near 50-point advantage over her nearest rival for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton can probably afford to take her time.

But she must remember that she lost in 2008 not to someone who was arguably any better at retail politics but whose rhetoric made voters believe in the possibility of transformational change.

Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who this week launched his campaign for the Republican nomination with a sweeping speech that drew heavily on his youth and roots as the son of Cuban immigrants, clearly plans to make a play for this mantle.

The US already has plenty of ordinary. For Mrs Clinton and her "Scooby" advisers, the real lesson of 2008 may be that voters gravitate to the perception of extraordinary.

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