Frank Bruni, a center-left columnist for the New York Times, slammed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to humanize herself as “calculated and packaged.”
The Clinton campaign recently said it would attempt to show more “heart” and “humor” from Clinton amid criticism that her campaign seems distant and excessively controlled.
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Part of the strategy was a sit-down human-interest interview with HBO “Girls” co-creator Lena Dunham, a popular figure among young liberal women.
In an online tease for the interview, Clinton makes an apparently scripted joke about the musician Lenny Kravitz, whose penis was recently exposed at one of his rock concerts.
“I’m baffled,” Bruni wrote in his latest column. “How can her response to charges that she’s too packaged and calculating be this packaged and calculated? And to counter her image as entrenched political royalty, why would she enlist stars whose presence merely emphasizes her pull with, and membership in, the glittery world of celebrity?”
“It’s to Dunham’s shrewd credit that she grabbed a piece of the action. It serves her well. But for Clinton? It’s a contrivance,” said Bruni, who has criticized Clinton’s political career as “psychologicial torture.”