![]() Everything a politician does adds to their message and can cause shifts in the image that is being cultivated. A ‘message’ in political parlance is the character that a politician presents to a public through their behaviours, backstory, morality and issues (Lempert & Silverstein, 2012). Politicians attempt to craft an image for themselves as an essential part of their message. What we refer to in this essay as ‘faces’, can be conceptualized as the different images that different audiences attribute to Clinton and the ones Clinton produces. ![]() In this paper we retrace the origins of this ‘two-faced’ image that Clinton has cultivated: is it a creation of her own actions and inconsistent message, or it is the media that have created these conflicting faces of Clinton? Of all the people who have voted for Trump in the 2016 elections, more than 75% stated that they thought she was not honest or trustworthy and more than 90% thought she did not have the right personality to serve as a president ( NY Times, 2016). Is it any wonder that Clinton has been termed ‘two faced Hillary’? In the end, it seems her reputation as being two-faced has won over the image she would have pursued herself. The material that emerged and was debated in 2016 has a historical intertextuality: it just added to a set of discourses about her, going back more than two decades, which is why the current material about scandals and double-facedness could be made so strong. She was First Lady in the 1990s, then joined active politics and ran against Obama in the presidential primaries of 2008. Clinton was both trustworthy and corrupt, both experienced and burdened by a negative past. Hillary Clinton's "untrustworthy image" has a long history. Apparently, one was led to believe that Clinton was both progressive, too progressive and not progressive enough, that she was a supporter of normal families, but also of big businesses. ![]() Instead of forging ae strong and clear image for herself, Clinton seemed to be unwillingly juggling a wide variety of different images. An analysis of Clinton's different faces in her message, discourse and campaigning and the ones she seems to put up in various media to various audiences.Ĭlinton has suffered from an image problem. It gave her adversaries ammunition to build a 'negative image' of her, of her having two faces: the one of the experienced progressive politician supporting the middle class, and the other of the corrupt supporter of big businesses. Hillary Clinton was plagued by her political history. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |