http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/us/politics/30clinton.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=sloginPolitical Memo
The Clinton Conundrum: What’s Behind the Laugh? By PATRICK HEALY
Published: September 30, 2007
It was January 2005, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had just finished a solemn speech about abortion rights — urging all sides to find “common ground” on the issue and referring to abortion as “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.”
Stepping offstage, she took questions from reporters, and found herself being grilled about whether she was moderating her own pro-choice position. And suddenly it happened: Mrs. Clinton let loose a hearty belly laugh that lasted a few seconds. Reporters glanced at one another as if they had missed the joke.
But nothing particularly funny had occurred; it was, instead, a deployment of the Clinton Cackle.
At that moment, the laugh seemed like the equivalent of an eye-roll — she felt she was being nitpicked, so she shamed her inquisitors by chuckling at them (or their queries). But friends of hers told a different story: She has this fantastic sense of humor, you see, but it’s too sarcastic to share with the general public because not everyone likes sarcasm. (Mrs. Clinton, for example, sometimes likes to tweak people for missing an obvious point by saying to them, “Hello?”
So, instead of alienating Iowans who might not vote for edginess, Mrs. Clinton goes for the lowest-common-denominator display of her funny bone: She shows that she can laugh, and that her laugh has a fullness and depth.
Perhaps. The reality is, Mrs. Clinton is the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination right now, and the commensurate political attacks and criticism are coming at her from all sides. She needs ways to respond without appearing defensive or brittle, her advisers say.
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And then, less often but more notably, she copes with the pressure by using what friends have come to call the Cackle. At Wednesday’s debate, for instance, former Senator Mike Gravel complained about her vote on an Iran resolution and said he was "ashamed" of her. Asked to respond, Mrs. Clinton laughed before answering, as if to minimize the matter. Last Sunday, meanwhile, she appeared on all five of the major morning talk shows, and her laughter seemed heavily caffeinated. Chris Wallace, of Fox News, first pressed Mrs. Clinton about why she was so “hyperpartisan,” and that drew a huge cackle. (Coming from Fox, her aides said, the question was pretty funny.) At another point, Mr. Wallace switched gears and said, “let me ask you about health care,” and Mrs. Clinton responded, “Yeah, I’d love you to ask me about health care” — and then let it rip, again, a bit quizzically.
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Jon Stewart skewered Mrs. Clinton on “The Daily Show” last week with a compilation of her outbursts from the Sunday morning shows. Mr. Stewart said that some people found her to be “some kind of synthetic being that cries mercury,” and he tweaked some of her laughs as a robotic expression of her strategic goal: to convey to the audience, “I’m joyful!”
“She’ll be our first president that you can’t spill water on,” Mr. Stewart said.
Clinton advisers find the interest in her laugh a little laughable. They fall somewhere between bemused and irritated by questions that suggest Mrs. Clinton is less than genuine — like whether her use of laughter during an interview was a way for her to undercut a serious question or to avoid answering it altogether.
“Seems pretty basic — that’s the way she laughs,” one Clinton adviser said. “She has a good sense of humor about the process.”
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