Hillary's Everyday People campaign begins with a roadtrip to Iowa in a van — with spontaneous (-looking?) stops along the way.

Politico reports: 

While she has no planned pit stops on her road trip — which was her own idea — the candidate stopped by a gas station in Pennsylvania on Sunday. She later tweeted a picture of the stop, saying, “Road trip! Loaded the van & set off for IA. Met a great family when we stopped this afternoon. Many more to come. -H”

Clinton asked top aides whether a road trip was feasible about a month ago, one of her staffers said. Instead of a motorcade, she is traveling in a three-car caravan, the smallest possible arrangement given the former first lady’s security constraints.

I'm calling it her Everyday People campaign, because "everyday" is the word that jumped out of Hillary's announcement video, which I summarized yesterday like this:

There are a whole lot of people in it saying this and that about their lives, but take my word for it, Hillary Clinton shows up in the end and says something about her life... that's she's running for President:

There's some connection between "everyday Americans" and Hillary Clinton. That's the idea to be planted in your head. It's just an ad. It could just as well be a Coca-Cola ad. Good people, going about their everyday lives, and then The Product! There's no sense or reason to any of it, but why should there be?

She said "everyday Americans," but I'm saying "Everyday People," because: 1. The connection being made is from the lofty, elite Hillary to the common people, and there's no stress on the distinction between American people and people elsewhere, and 2. When I hear "everyday" used as an adjective, I think of the song "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone: "I am no better and neither are you/We are the same whatever we do/You love me. you hate me, you know me, and then/You can't figure out the bag I'm in/I am everyday people...." Seems fitting!

So here she is tweeting "Road trip!" like a freewheeling young person, when the truth is that she hasn't driven a car since 1996. She can't really be spontaneous and everyday, but that's the image she wants you to see (and you can't figure out the bag she's in). "Instead of a motorcade, she is traveling in a three-car caravan..." Do everyday people understand the motorcade/caravan distinction?

Having written about the new ad, I was drawn in by a headline at Vox: "Hillary Clinton’s announcement video is surprisingly bold, fascinating filmmaking." Despite the headline, most of the analysis of Hillary's video — by Todd VanDerWerff — is like mine (though VanDerWerff shows more enthusiasm):

The first things we see in "Getting Started" aren't anything we'd associate with campaign imagery. They are, instead, a bunch of people going about their daily lives. And that goes on for most of the ad....

We're meant to be pleased that they're taking control of their lives — everybody in the ad has some big goal they're working toward — but also think that we could just walk up to them and start having a conversation. Like we could with all of these people!...

[The ad] subtly reinforces [Hillary's] connection to everybody else in the video. They're all part of the same movement, the same goal. The woman who's moving so her daughter can go to a better school has a dream that is no better or worse than Clinton's ambition of running for president.

VanDerWerff's article veers deeply into film-studies material about the placement of the figure in the frame and the colors and shapes. The headline is misleading because this sort of thing is only "fascinating" to people who are into that sort of close inspection. It would be more accurate to say: Come on, let's get film-studies geeky about Hillary's video. Or really: ... about Hillary and Rand Paul's videos, because much of the article is about 2 Rand Paul videos. I had not seen either of those, and they really are very different from Hillary's video... and different from each other. But that's material for another post, so I will stop here.