Once again, in my car this afternoon, I heard an NPR reporter talking about Hillary's plan to, once again, re-introduce herself to voters, which NPR will cover like the good Beltway Journalists they are, tomorrow morning, no doubt in great detail.

So, for fun, I went back to look at all the other times Hillary has needed a reboot to update the memeware about her that resides in the American Public's collective mind.

Here's a not so oldie, from last summer's NY Times article, Re-Re-Re-Reintorducing Hillary Clinton by Mark Leibovich, dated July 15, 2015. After the reporter told her he'd just seen a moose, well, I'll let him explain it:

We were meeting in an old conference room of the grand hotel, which is perhaps best known to history as the site of the Bretton Woods Conference, a gathering of delegates from 44 countries to regulate the international financial system after World War II. Clinton and I sat at the same table where the agreement that established the International Monetary Fund was signed in 1944. As a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton was of course no stranger to such heady sites of statecraft. But what we started talking about was the moose. She had seen a few in her day, she told me. ‘‘I’ve eaten moose, too,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve had moose stew.’’

She then went on a long story about having worked in Alaska washing dishes at a resort. Who knew Hillary Clinton used to be a plebe like regular folks! Of course, this was a friendly article, almost gushing by a reporter who freely admitted he has interviewed Hillary "many times over the years, in various depths." he goes on and on about having read her college letters that a Clinton aide showed him in 2007 during her first run for the Presidency. Read this and feel all the warm fuzzies he has for her:

Though the letters were from long ago, I never viewed Clinton the same way after I read them. They were impressively self-aware for a college student, and in places even foreshadowed the public roles she would go on to play and the shifting identities they entailed. ‘‘Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,’’ Rodham wrote in April 1967. ‘‘So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.’’ For as much as Clinton or anyone has evolved over 50 years, the letters offer a reminder that, at the very least, there is someone markedly different inside and away from the sunlight. As first lady, Clinton openly entertained fantasies of escaping her bubble and indulging in flings of anonymity. ‘‘On a recent trip to Arkansas, I had a sudden impulse to drive,’’ she wrote in a syndicated column from 1995. ‘‘I jumped behind the wheel of a car and, much to the discomfort of my Secret Service detail, drove myself around town. For several hours, I enjoyed a marvelous sensation of personal freedom.’’ She went on to describe the ‘‘odd duality’’ of her public life and lamented how ‘‘experiences that millions of Americans take for granted have become extraordinary for me.’’

Don't you just feel the love for poor Hillary, always misunderstood, always wronged by having to spend so much of her life in the public eye. Then again, she could have chosen to leave politics and the intense ]glare of the public spotlight when Bill left office, but we all know she chose to run for the open U.S. Senate in New York in 2000, while still First Lady. Not saying she should have chosen to abandon her ambitions, just that it strikes me a disingenuous to complain as she did that all the public attention she knew came with a political career dehumanized her.

At an appearance in April of last year in Portland, Ore., Clinton was asked what it was like to have lived most of her adult life under such scrutiny. She reminisced about her early days in Arkansas, back when she drove her own car and took Chelsea to ballet class. She betrayed an almost wistful longing for that time, contrasting her energy and freedom then with the exhaustions of her public life today — ‘‘the level of relentless scrutiny that now stalks not just people in politics but people in all kinds of public arenas,’’ in her phrase. ‘‘It gives you a sense of being kind of dehumanized, I guess.’’

Well, I that Times article is only one incident of a long history of doing this type of thing in the media. Just check out this video and try not to laugh too hard:

Here are just a few of what could be many more examples from her 2015-2016 campaign, in which she and/or her campaign's PR team have attempted to use the media to try to convince people to vote for the "New and Improved" Hillary, Version 2016.0:

NY Times article, "Hillary Clinton Re-emerges, by Design (but Also by Surprise)," dated April 16, 2015

MsNBC in May, 2015

Her first Campaign ads for the 2016 race, released in August 2015

Fusion article, April 11, 2016: "How Hillary Clinton has a fresh start with young voters"



It's such a constant theme of her career that even conservatives are willing to offer her free advice on how to best do it, such as this May 13, 2016 article article in The Week, entitled "How Hilllary Clinton Should redefine herself,"by Noah Millman.

[O]ne of Clinton's problems is that she's already well-known, and well-known for repeatedly — and unconvincingly — reinventing herself. So, supposedly, the public isn't going to be receptive to yet another attempt. [...] If she isn't to squander a precious opportunity to reintroduce herself, yet again, to the American people, Clinton needs to ask herself a novel question: What is the version of myself that people want to listen to, and to vote for? Not "what are people looking for" — that's too open-ended, too likely to lead her to pretend to be something she really isn't. Instead it's "what version of myself." What authentic side of me is the one that draws them to me, as opposed to pushing them away? And how do I get people to see that side of me?

And then he tells her she needs to tear up in a very public way to show she's a real human being with an authentic history of suffering and struggling. Yeah, I don't expect to see that happen either.

The thing I keep coming back to, however, is that Millman is right, in one sense. If you have a record of constantly trying to fake or pretend to be a person you think the voters want, eventually they catch onto your game. Which is why I expect this next re-introduction effort to be no more successful than all her Previous failures. Ultimately, most Americans have made up their minds about who Hillary is, and all her campaign's efforts to boost her favorables by showing the "real, authentic side of Hillary" aren't going to move those numbers much at all. Those who have swallowed the Clinton Kool-Aid don't need to be sold, and those who don't trust her and consider her a manufactured politician that only cares about money and power aren't going to buy one more sales effort, hard or soft.

No, her only hope is to go super-negative on Trump. Frankly, it's all she really knows how to do well when on the stump. It may work, or it may not. But it's too late in the day for anyone to be convinced that the real Hillary has been hidden from view all these years by a cruel and nasty media or some vast right-wing conspiracy. We know too much about her speeches, Bill's, the Clinton Foundation, her friendship with war criminal Henry Kissinger, her record as Secretary of State, her "new-found" support by ex-Bushies and neocons, and, last but not least, her "damn emails," to unlearn what we've learned.

Or to fall back on one of the "old sayings" that my daughter says I use too much, that bullshit ain't gonna fly. Well, it may old, but it's true.