Help me.
Hillary Clinton, whose greatest qualification for president is perhaps that she is a) a woman who b) everyone knows, walked into a Chipotle in Maumee, Ohio today and went unrecognized. She was on her way to Iowa in her Van of Populism on her Road Trip of Everyday Americanism.
Maybe it was the dark sunglasses. Or maybe she had a certain je ne sais — qui?
But nobody took notice of the celebrity in front of the counter. Fellow patrons paid her no more attention than a driver would get from a toll taker.
Nor did the restaurant’s staff notice Mrs. Clinton, until this reporter, tipped off that she had dined there, telephoned.
The Chipotle manager, Charles Wright, insisted at first that the tip must have been false.
But he offered to review his security-camera recordings, and quickly reversed himself. There was Mrs. Clinton, in a bright pink shirt, ordering a chicken burrito bowl — and carrying her own tray.
“The thing is, she has these dark sunglasses on,” Mr. Wright said. “She just was another lady.”
A couple theories.
1) Hillary Clinton is so disdainful of the American people and feels so entitled to the presidency that she feels no need to schmooze with the hoi polloi unless absolutely necessary, even in OHIO.
Hillary working so hard to avoid answering questions from anyone that she had to go incognito to… Chipotle.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) April 14, 2015
Hillary feels so entitled to being president that she cant even strike up a conversation with Chipotle workers in a state like Ohio. Unreal.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) April 14, 2015
If Romney goes into a Chipotle without talking to the staff story is about how disconnected a person he is and how he can't relate to them.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) April 14, 2015
Hillary announces she's running and a six week bus tour… and then can't be bothered to talk to regular workers in Ohio a day later.
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) April 14, 2015
When nobody notices me at Chipotle I don't get wall to wall press coverage. pic.twitter.com/55c2qeDjzU
— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) April 14, 2015
2) Hillary Clinton is such an unnatural and disingenuous campaigner that it did not occur to her to rub elbows with the staff and clientele of Chipotle without a scrum of reporters and cameras reminding her that’s her job.
She’s no Bill, that’s for sure.
“The manager of the Chipotle in Ohio had to look at the security video to prove it was Hillary Clinton who stopped in at Chipotle today. She went to Chipotle, she got lunch apparently, and she didn’t talk to anybody. Ohio’s kind of important in presidential politics. And if Bill Clinton were on that ride, he would still be in that Chipotle and somehow would have known a third of the people.”
Host Anderson Cooper chimed in saying, “He would be serving food there, wouldn’t he?”
“It’s a trap. She’s not going to reinvent herself as the everywoman, and you can’t go out there and say, ‘I’m one of you,’” said a top Clinton adviser from the 2008 campaign. “But she can say she cares about people. She can say, ‘I’m a rich person, but I actually care about people unlike the Republicans.’ … In that regard, the van thing is remarkably dangerous because she runs the risk of looking phony, it could cement the idea that she’s inauthentic — Saturday Night Live already has half of its show written for next week.”
To keep that from happening, her staff has been scrubbing all of its written materials for any verbiage that suggests Clinton experiences the same kind of anxieties most people face — when her campaign talks about a new sense of ‘humility,’ this is it.
The goal: to avoid the kind of damaging gaffe like her now-infamous declaration last summer that the Clinton family were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Even before that debacle, campaign staffers said that Clinton took notice of how effective President Obama’s attacks against Mitt Romney’s work with Bain Capital were, and she was determined not to let any of her opponents, in either party, mount a similar attack.
In seriousness, why get in a van that goes through Ohio and stops at a Chipotle if you’re not going to even do the bare minimum of saying hi to anyone who works there? Does she think carnitas alone will convince us? SNL should have a ball with it.
4) The Hillary Clinton campaign has reached the zenith of opacity on Day One, with the New York Times inspecting security tapes from the Maumee Chipotle to determine what a woman running for president is doing.
5) The process of running for president has reached the zenith of stupidity with the New York Times inspecting security tapes from the Maumee Chipotle to determine what a woman running for president is doing.
6) Doesn’t this sound like something Leslie Knope would consider in a weaker moment of ambition on the advice of a campaign manager before coming to her senses and eating waffles with the people of Pawnee like she was born to do?
7) Hillary is thinking, “Why the hell didn’t I erase those tapes?”
Exit question: You tell me. What does it all mean???
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