Hillary Clinton takes a lot of selfies with voters. But she’d rather be taking their questions.
In the February edition of Esquire, Clinton tells writer Tom Junod that selfies may actually be hurting the way politicians understand their supporters.
Clinton even has a name for it: “The Tyranny of the Selfie.”
“It used to be — and I was talking to President Obama about this the other day — it used to be that you would do an event like this and then you would shake hands with people and they would talk to you,” Clinton told the magazine after an event in Salem, New Hampshire. “They would say, ‘I liked what you said about this’ or ‘You didn’t mention that’ or ‘Can I tell you this?’ And it was a constant learning and absorbing experience.”
“Now,” Clinton added, “it’s just ‘Can I take a selfie? Can I take a picture?’ People just want to capture that moment, and I just try to be accommodating.”
Before camera phones, politicians would routinely shake hands with people after events and pick up tidbits of information on how their supporters were feeling. Bill Clinton was famous for leaving a rope line with handfuls of ideas on how to tackle issues that came up in conversations with voters.
Rope lines don’t look like that today, though. Supporters — from senior citizens to children — jockey for position in order to ask Clinton for as selfie. Many hand Clinton their phone and she actually snaps the photo. Sometimes, she even has to maneuver the cell phone from home screen to picture mode.
What’s more, people occasionally use their question at a town hall to ask Clinton for a picture.
In the interview, Junod remarks that Clinton is good at taking selfies.
“That’s what people ask for,” she responded. “If I’m going to try to get to everybody, I have to be good at it.”
Clinton is not the first candidate to offer criticism of the trend of ropeline selfies. Jeb Bush last month called selfies “the 11th Amendment of the Bill of Rights.”
“I don’t know, look, it wasn’t that long ago that people wanted signatures on things, and now, forget that, ‘I want my damn selfie. I’m not leaving until I get it,’ So we spend a lot of quality time doing that,” Bush said, tongue firmly in cheek.
Clinton: I’m a firewall between Republicans and the White House
In the interview with Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, casts herself as “a firewall” between Republicans and the White House.
“It certainly enhances the sense of responsibility I feel to try to make my case as effectively as possible,” Clinton said when asked about the Republican field and some of the rhetoric on the opposing side. “It’s so contrary to what I think politics should be about, and the kind of people who should run for the most important job in the world. So I try not to be distracted by it or be knocked off course by it. But I do feel extra pressure when I hear some of what they say.”
Clinton added, “I have to win to be a firewall against that extreme partisanship and that real rejection of compromise.”
Since the calendar turned to 2016, Clinton has upped her focus on Republican candidates, casting herself as the most electable Democrat to keep the White House out of Republican hands. She routinely knocks them as out of touch with reality and questions their platforms.
“Honestly, I have to ask you, who do they talk to when they come to Iowa,” she said in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Monday. “I mean, I see them with people and I’m wondering if it’s like the same group of actors, they just move from event to event to event, because honestly I don’t know who they are talking to.”
Asked about Donald Trump in the interview with Esquire, Clinton said while his rhetoric is “fact free,” it isn’t “cost free.”
“When he says something, he’s not just talking to whoever those people are who come to his rallies,” she said. “He’s talking to the whole world, and what he’s saying plays right into the hands of a group like ISIS.”
