Which candidates do best in a crowd of selfie seekers?

From a NYT article titled "Facing a Selfie Election, Presidential Hopefuls Grin and Bear It":

Candidates can now spend an hour — or sometimes two, as Senator Rand Paul did last month in New Hampshire — exhausting a line of eager selfie seekers. Others, like Senator Ted Cruz, have learned to add an extra 20 minutes at the beginning and end of events because so many people want pictures.

Jeb Bush has perfected a technique suited to his 6-foot-3 frame: For his shorter fans, he will take the picture with his own outstretched selfie stick of an arm. The sons of Gov. Scott Walker have watched their father take so many, they say he has significantly polished his shutterbug skills. Gov. Chris Christie’s staff says he has taken “too many to count.”

Good for Jeb. Good for all the big and tall males who can handle this ordeal for hours on a daily basis. But what about Hillary? She doesn't have a 6-foot-3 frame and a long selfie-stick of an arm or the personality to endure this submission to the grasping arms of others. The article is topped by a terrific photograph of a lovely young woman clamping Hillary into the selfie position. The NYT selected that photograph. The young woman is perfectly fresh-faced and excited but not too excited. She even looks like a young Hillary — as if young Hillary had time-traveled to 2015 to take a selfie with herself.

But you have to know that other selfie situations are not so perfect. The Hillary doppelganger wears a tank top — it must be a hot day — and her armpit is clamped over Hillary's jacketed shoulder. Picture a hundred armpits — from all manner of "everyday people" — clamped over that jacketed shoulder on that hot afternoon. Picture a hundred hot days with a thousand sweaty — hairy! — armpits. How does that nice jacket look now? How appealing is the expression on Hillary's face in every single one of those photographs (which we'll be seeing on line)?

This is horrible for the woman in a way that it simply is not for the big-boned, long-armed Jeb and his outrageous male privilege. Did Hillary's people put the New York Times on to this story? The article has a nice picture of Hillary and a first paragraph in which Hillary helps the selfie-taker use his/her own iPhone. People having trouble working their own phones is not the topic of the article at all, and its story of Hillary taking control in a phone technology incident sounds like something the campaign might have put out there to cancel out that embarrassing email in which Huma had to walk Hillary away from the misconception that the way to get the fax machine to work was to leave it off the hook.

The article does not proceed to talk about Hillary's struggle with the endless selfie ordeal. It doesn't make my point — that her opponents have an advantage dealing with these new conditions (conditions her husband didn't face but might very well have enjoyed, perhaps a little too much). The article mobilizes various quotes in service of the proposition that this selfie taking just isn't right, notably Republicans:

“It’s self-serving, and the candidate is kind of screwed,” said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party. “They just have to put up with it, because how do you decipher who is a fan and who wants to fill their profile with pictures of them with candidates?” said Mr. Robinson, now the editor of The Iowa Republican, a political publication....

“Please stop,” wrote Ben Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon and Republican presidential hopeful, in a recent opinion piece for The Washington Post that raised a jarring if somewhat hyperbolic concern: Selfies kill.

Oh! Maybe I'm wrong to link this article to the Clinton campaign. Maybe Ben Carson is behind it. He can't handle the ordeal? Must I add race critique to my gender critique? NO! Carson wasn't talking about selfie-taking on the campaign trail at all or his fears of somehow getting killed in the process. His piece is entirely about the way ordinary people endanger themselves in cars and on cliffsides. He doesn't belong in this article, and that's one more reason to trace the article back to Hillary.

About halfway into the article we get to this:

Few people embody the selfie craze like Maggie Fitzgerald, a lobbyist in Des Moines who has maneuvered her way into photos with politicians willing and unwilling. Her biggest gets: Donald J. Trump, Rick Perry and Gov. Bobby Jindal, whom she found eager and obliging, and Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Paul and Mr. Carson, who seemed much less enthusiastic.

“Sometimes they’ll ask me, ‘Don’t you want a normal picture?’ ” Ms. Fitzgerald said in an interview. “No, I just want a selfie.” She is undecided in the race, but said she gained some insight into the candidates by their demeanor during selfies. “Most of them aren’t stiff about it,” Ms. Fitzgerald added. “Some of them might be. But they shouldn’t be president.”

This is the great fear. Candidates will be judged by these selfies — and not just whether they look good. It's a warmth test. You shouldn't be President if you're stiff about getting clamped time after time into the sweaty armpits of Iowans and New Hampshirites. It's so unfair. And Fitzgerald exemplifies the very sort of insincere selfie-taker that Craig Robinson, editor of The Iowa Republican, was just talking about: How do you decipher who is a fan and who wants to fill their profile with pictures of them with candidates? It's so unfair!

Then there are those who see the selfie as just one more example of how people have become slaves to their devices...

Slaves? Isn't it time to bury that metaphor? Wrap it in a Confederate flag and lay it to rest.

... at the expense of human interaction. 

And yet the problem for the candidate is the human interaction — the excessive, armpit-y warmth and the revelation of down-deep-in-the-bones stiffness that communicates the negative answer to the all-important question Does she care about people like me?

Queen Elizabeth II has said she finds the trend disconcerting and indicated she misses eye contact with her subjects.

The Queen! What's she doing here? I think you know.

The article ends with the topic I began with: Who is helped?

Many campaigns say they are benefiting after posing for all those pictures. When shared on Facebook and Instagram, they can exponentially increase a candidate’s visibility, spreading an authentic memento that helps extend the chatter around a rally beyond those who attended.

That's just great for everyone who's in the business of increasing visibility and who has the big-boned 6-foot-3 frame that puts his armpit on top. But that's not Hillary.