With Hillary, appearances are everything

That van is the cosmetic surgery of populism, the tummy tuck of a 1 percenter auditioning for a role somewhere between Evita and Auntie Mame. But the Clintons have always had a strange knack for getting people to admire them for their phoniness, not in spite of it. Their admirers — and there are many of them — are like those odd ducks who prefer breast implants to the genuine articles, the more obviously artificial the better.

That’s the strange thing about the career of Herself: Because she is a feminist, or at least a woman who plays one on television, to bring up the subject of her appearance is taken as prima facie chauvinism, boorish boobishness of the sort that illustrates exactly why we need a woman as president. (Maybe. But this woman?) At the same time, appearance is 83 percent of every presidential campaign, and 97 percent — at least — of a Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. In some cases, the appeal is literally skin deep: When Team Herself unveiled its campaign icon — an uppercase “H” with a vector pointing to the right — the daft young actress Lena Dunham remarked that she wanted to get a “tramp stamp” tattoo of the logo.

Much of life comes down to good design. How good the H is going to be at that remains unclear: On launch day, the “Jobs” section of her website was a highly symbolic link to nowhere. Jobs? “Not found.” Yeah . . . tell America about it. But she will have first-rate help, gobs of money, and plenty of celebrity flesh to throw at the slavering gibbering maw of the electorate. Herself knows that appearances matter: None of her political career makes a hell of a lot of sense if you think about it for three minutes.