Donald Trump, I’m fairly sure, doesn’t hug. He has a well-documented disgust for shaking hands, which he describes as “barbaric,” and he just isn’t a touchy-feely guy. As Buzzfeed reported yesterday, Trump once said in an interview that men who change their children’s diapers are “act[ing] like the wife,” and when it comes to his own children, “I won’t do anything to take care of them. I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.” Sounds like there’s a lot of love in the Trump household.

There are plenty of more important issues than parenting styles on which to decide this election, of course. But it goes beyond just that. Let’s take a look at Clinton’s ad, which has the feel of a closing argument in the primaries, but also clearly looks towards the general election:

There are a couple of things going on here. The first is the fact that it’s all about Clinton’s connection with people — we see her talking with what appear to be ordinary individuals, some of whom it seems like she just met and some of whom it seems she knows. Her campaign obviously wants to fight against the idea that she’s removed from people’s everyday concerns. The second is who we see her interacting with. The only well-known people in the ad are Rep. John Lewis, and Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly — who, by the way, is the only white man we see. There are a couple of children in the ad, but mostly we’re looking at women, women of all colors and religions. It’s almost a catalogue of everyone Donald Trump has offended, while the singer says, “spread a little hope and love now.”

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Add it together, and you have what could be one of Clinton’s central themes for the fall campaign: that this is an election pitting hope against fear, unity against division, love against hate.

There was a time when a female candidate wouldn’t dare campaign on “soft” ideas like that. They had to demonstrate that they were tough and competent in order to overcome the gender biases voters brought to the campaign. But Clinton doesn’t have that problem — to many voters, her competence and strength are taken as a given. But she does less well on likeability, which ads like this one are an attempt to address.

Now we should say that it’s ludicrous to choose a president based on who you’d like to have a beer with or who’d be most likely to give you a hug. (A side note: George W. Bush, manly man though he might have been, was very big on hugging. As he said in 2002, “There’s only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids on the death of their loved ones. Others hug, but having committed the troops, I’ve got an additional responsibility to hug, and that’s me, and I know what it’s like.”) But it’s possible to see this kind of image-making as a symbolic expression of something more substantive. Clinton would argue that her actions as president will be more reflective of her spirit of inclusion, while Trump’s policies will reflect a hostility toward many different kinds of Americans, which he has demonstrated on the campaign trail.

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It’s also easy to foresee that the Clinton campaign will try to make an issue not just out of Trump’s particular comments and ideas, but the entire spirit of the Republican primary. This has been a campaign featuring an unusual amount of anger, bitterness, and at times even violence — and we haven’t even gotten to the Republican convention, where there could be more of all three. I expect to see Democratic ads that string together clips of Republican presidential candidates snarling and yelling at each other, juxtaposed with Clinton offering warmth and understanding.

It’s long been thought that the more optimistic and sunny presidential candidate is the one who wins. While every candidate claims that things will be great once they’re elected, Trump is unusual in that he doesn’t just say that we have a lot of problems to address, he describes America as a post-apocalyptic nightmare of misery and despair. “This country is a hellhole. We are going down fast,” he said last year. “We can’t do anything right. We’re a laughing-stock all over the world. The American dream is dead.”