It will be especially interesting watching how fans and opponents attempt to ‘frame’ the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign, and indeed each other.

My Indy piece a few weeks ago looked at the dynamics of framing in the UK election context:

A classic framing ploy is the Dead Cat Denial. You untruthfully accuse your opponent of having a dead cat on the front doorstep (or some other seemingly unpleasant fact). When your opponent exclaims crossly that this is utterly untrue, you slyly reply: “Ah, now you’re denying that you have a dead cat on your doorstep?”

The ensuing angry denials from your opponent create a general mood that this person is always banging on about dead cats. After all, if there isn’t a dead cat or other dead animal there at the house somewhere, why is he or she getting so emotional about it? Perhaps too emotional in general to be trusted? You tip-toe away, seed of doubt sown. Mission accomplished: a sneaky reputational frame-up.

In his 2008 election campaign Barack Obama took framing to a giddy new height. He led on “Hope and Change”. He not only sold that bland but positive slogan as a dynamic policy mandate. He sold himself as epitomising hope and change. If John McCain had an election slogan at all, it sank without trace. Worse, by virtue of his misfortune in not being Barack Obama, McCain was open to attack as opposing hope and change themselves, and what can be more odious than that? Watch what happens if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic nomination next time. Any mere male who dares disagree with her ipso facto will be “framed” as a sexist reactionary.

As of this morning, the Conservatives are busy promoting the horrors of a Labour/SNP coalition (thereby framing Labour as nutty wreckers). Labour are hitting back by attacking the Conservatives as posh/uncaring/anti-NHS etc.

Zzzzzz.

This is an interesting pro-Hillary analysis of her video announcing her campaign. No doubt based on insider campaign briefing, it shows just how subtly language can be used to send implicit reassuring political messages:

The key here is the tone. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Clinton’s advisers, after pondering how to handle GOP efforts to link her to Obama, have concluded that her best bet is not to distance herself from Obama’s record, but to praise the economic progress he has made, and promise a “new chapter” designed to build on it, one focused on giving those “everyday Americans” a better shot at getting ahead.

… I strongly suspect the Clinton campaign has concluded that Americans are exhausted by the ideological death struggles of the Obama presidency, and that swing voters and independents don’t see the Obama years as quite the smoking apocalyptic hellscape Republicans continue to describe. With the GOP hoping to terrify voters with the prospect of Hillary-as-Obama-third-term, and with the 2016 GOP hopefuls zealously vowing to roll back the Obama presidency, Republicans will likely continue re-litigating how awful the Obama years have supposedly been.

The Clinton gamble is that swing voters don’t want to hear this argument anymore; that they agree Obama’s policies have not turned the economy around fast enough, but think this is understandable given the circumstances and don’t see those policies as an utter, abject failure.

The people in the video, then, are cautiously anticipating that they may well continue progressing, but they are uncertain about how to manage the transitions they face. Clinton, the video tells us, identifies with that uncertainty; she will help restore economic mobility.

The video contains zero policy specifics. But it contains the seeds of an agenda in the manner in which it defines its subjects’ economic challenges: The woman who is moving house “just” to get her child into a better school; the woman who is pondering how to reenter the job market after five years raising kids; the immigrant brothers taking the risk to set up a business; the college student uncertain about how hospitable the job market will prove.

In other words, trust wise old Granny Clinton to run a steady ship. Why gamble with all those impetuous risky Republican men?

That bland yet oddly sexist sub-text of the all-wise Grandmother Willow as the personification of the cynical and slippery H Clinton is of course ridiculous. But if you say so do you sound … mean-spirited and even strident? A brutish member of the patriarchy?

Maybe. But it’s hard not to want to have a mighty bash.

Thus Deborah Tyler, who (I assume) at least can not be accused of being a nasty man, reaches deep into the bran tub of language and pulls out some feisty phrasing:

In driving the Clinton franchise to the highest levels of power on earth, Hillary has wretchedly compensated for her husband’s porous boundaries by constructing impenetrable walls around herself. As he became more reckless, she must have become more wary.

Many years ago Hillary accepted the job of being Bills’ after-party cleanup crew. In the service of their upward march, she had no choice. Many people think Hillary Clinton is a psychopath without a conscience who cares nothing about her husband’s betrayals on a personal level. That formulation does not seem supported by what has leaked out about the Clinton’s relationship. It is more likely that she is a wellspring of anger hiding behind a smile you can hang laundry on.

What is certain is she spent years mopping up and deodorizing Bill’s messes. Bill’s affairs with and attacks on women have been more destructive to Hillary’s psychological integrity and self-worth than some miraculous hundred grand showing up in the Clinton cookie jar have been to him. His sexist violence strikes at the heart of who she claims to be, and continues to damage her basic sense of security and candidacy. For forty years, a room full of strangers is where the party starts for Bill, and where the messes are made for Hillary. For forty years every time Hillary entered a room full of strangers she had her bucket and mop. A bimbo splatter might be found anywhere. For forty years a room full of strangers, interacting in an unscripted moment, has been Hillary’s worst nightmare …

That a president gets to pass the office to his brother, wife or kid runs counter to the Constitution and American ideals. That Hillary — who has done so much dirty work for an impeached president, and one who should have been — should claim that inheritance is particularly repulsive. She has become the Dorian Gray of politics, a terrible visage nobody can bear to behold. Nor does she, hiding at the bottom of her own slop bucket, wish to be seen.

H Clinton’s huge advantage is that she has armies of people in the ‘mainstream media’ covering 24/7 for her ghastly record. Take the latest Newsweek. It opens its story about a plausible financial scandal involving Clinton not by wondering if the allegations are true, but by noting that the scandal will be used to attack her. The horror!