July 5, 2015

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.

18 comments:

Saint Croix said...

the big-boned, long-armed Jeb and his outrageous male privilege.

Yes, it's true. God loves us more!

Laslo Spatula said...

Leave the selfies to the nineteen and twenty year-old girls in various modes of undress.

That should be enough, America.

I am Laslo.

Laslo Spatula said...

"Picture a hundred hot days with a thousand sweaty — hairy! — armpits..."

Be fair: I bet there are some female Hillary supporters that DO shave their armpits.


I am Laslo.

Michael K said...

I used to know a former CBS News reporter named Bill Lynch who, in 1976, got Ford and Carter to make recordings for his telephone answering machine. After Carter won the election, Bill Lynch's answering machine message was "Hi, this is Jimmy Carter. Bill isn't home right now...." That was the technology of the time and it was just as creepy but still amusing for his friends.

rhhardin said...

And yet the problem for the candidate is the human interaction

The women's vote problem that's sending the country to hell.

amielalune said...

The law must be changed, then, Ann, to make things fair for Hillary! Ban selfies! Right??

campy said...

Picture a hairy, sweaty armpit clamping on a designer jacket — forever!

Rob said...

Huma Abedin (aka Mrs. Anthony Weiner) is well positioned to advise Hillary about selfies.

mccullough said...

Not likeable enough in the time of the selfie

lgv said...

There is a method to the madness, and I am guessint that the candidates have been coached on it by looking at the examples.

The focal length of camera phones are a little wider than normal. They have a lot of distortion. So, when taking selfies, make sure you are the furthest person from the camera. The downward angle of the Jeb and Christie photos are also good. It forces them to look up, which minimizes the double chin exposure. Remember, it's also good turn your body at a slight angle. Bend your neck like you are chicken, raising you chin relative to your neck, again to de-emphasize the neck. The camera won't know how odd you look from straight ahead. Stay away from the edges of the image, where distortion is most prevalent. (Converse is to place people you don't like on the edge of a fisheye lens shot.

robinintn said...

Could I just point out that taking a photo with someone else is by definition NOT a selfie. Despite the the Hilary campaign using the word in order to make the 21st century version of ordinary political gladhanding sound shallow, juvenile, and beneath any SERIOUS candidate. Such as Hilary.

Phil 314 said...

Interesting that in the photo at the top of the article the young woman has her phone backwards (the old style method of selfie) and the soon-to-be-clicked image is facing away from them.

(Was that picture staged so it could show the image on the iPhone?)

The Godfather said...

Thank God there aren't any serious issues at stake in the Presidential election! If there were, we wouldn't be discussing selfies, would we?

Ann Althouse said...

"Interesting that in the photo at the top of the article the young woman has her phone backwards (the old style method of selfie) and the soon-to-be-clicked image is facing away from them. (Was that picture staged so it could show the image on the iPhone?)"

Good catch. I say yes. Thanks for adding to the pile of evidence that this is Hillary campaign propaganda.

Bruce Hayden said...

I think that realistically, Hillary! Is going to suffer here. She really isn't agoodretail politician, and doesn't seem to like us prollys that much. Sure, she can get a couple of heavily scripted selfies, just like she did her listening tour of vetted Dem operatives. But actually letting strangers touch her? I don't think so.

Laslo Spatula said...

I had a girlfriend who liked to take selfies of herself while giving me blow-jobs: the moment my cock was in her mouth out came her iPhone.

She would experiment with angle and distance and composition, but always with my cock in her mouth. Partial profile: my cock in her mouth. Gazing upwards with smeared lipstick: my cock in her mouth. Sideways swizzle while topless: my cock in her mouth.

I asked what in particular she liked about taking these selfies; she explained she just liked pictures of herself with a cock in her mouth.

Sometimes it is just that simple.


I am Laslo.

n.n said...

Self-portrait? Selfie sounds remarkably... Well, selfish. Perhaps that's the association they wanted to form.

mikee said...

In the late 1970s I was a high school student and got to intern at my state legislature. The Speaker of the state House, who was in charge of us interns, had us into his office for a quick photo, each of us individually shaking his hand.

It was painfully obvious to me then that the pictures were taken to aggrandize him, not to provide us with anything memorable from our time there.

It is painfully obvious to me now that a selfie destroys that aggrandizing moment of being next to a powerful person, by putting the picture-taker at the center of the action, not the powerful person.

And that is why Bill Clinton's famously self-serving pic with JFK has always creeped me out. The picture was forced to be about Bill, by Bill,not the person who was important in the picture.

And Hillary? She uses ropes to corral her picture takers, to make sure they understand who is important in the pictures they take. No chance of a Young Republican actually getting close enough to her to ask why she is so very, very corrupt.