I enjoy reading or hearing stories that humanize candidates. The story of Mitt Romney helping to remove a stump from a neighbor’s yard was a good one, or how the Perry family adopted Marcus Luttrell — also a heartwarming, warm fuzzy inducing tale. Even John McCain recounting his time as a POW was powerful stuff.
These stories provide insight into how candidates live beyond the flashy lights, teleprompter flanked podiums, and soundbites of the politisphere. They’re meaningful. In many ways, these stories explain a core part of who they are.
But that’s not the case with Politico’s latest slobberfest.
Thursday morning, Politico published a story called Every wedding should have a Hillary Clinton Bible reading.
Obvious disagreement with the premise aside, what are we supposed to take from this story? What does it say about Hillary? That we now have proof Mrs. Clinton can read?
You know you’re tight with the boss when she attends your wedding, but it’s a whole other level of closeness when she takes part in the ceremony. Such was the case this past weekend as Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s steadfast foreign policy adviser, married Maggie Goodlander on Saturday at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.The Democratic presidential front-runner was on the program at the couple’s evening wedding, reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans, as the duo tied the knot at Battell Chapel on the Yale campus, where Goodlander attended law school and Sullivan has been teaching. (Clinton’s was a bigger role than that of U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, who gave a toast at the couple’s barbecue rehearsal dinner the evening before, which was also attended by Bill Clinton.) Hillary Clinton, for her part, squeezed the wedding into a busy week of East Coast fundraisers that included stops in Greenwich, Rhode Island, Boston and D.C.
Aside from the gratuitous east coast status-dropping, are we to think Clinton is a peach for taking time out of her uber busy fundraising to read a passage of scripture at a wedding? Does this reiterate the Hillary’s devout faith mantra because, Bible?
Apparently so.
Clinton’s gesture signals the devotion she has to Sullivan, who political watchers say may be poised to become the youngest national security adviser in history should she take the White House in 2016. Sullivan, 38, was one of Clinton’s most trusted confidants when she served as secretary of state. Before starting his teaching post at Yale Law School last August, he was Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. Goodlander, 28, is no stranger to politics either, having worked as a national security and foreign affairs adviser to Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Good stories go a long way in changing public perception of a candidate. This though? Better suited for the Beltway gossip columns.
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