The Morning Joe panel agreed Monday that Hillary Clinton has an authenticity problem that will not be solved by warm and fuzzy campaign ads.
The campaign released two ads late Sunday that seem designed to beat back a tide of polls showing that the public does not think Clinton cares about them. The ads focus on Clinton’s family life, transitioning from a biography of her mother, Dorothy, to Clinton’s new role as a "grandma."
While the ads aim to humanize Hillary Clinton, the MSNBC panel said the campaign has its work cut out for it.
"I just saw her picture on the front of New York Magazine," host Joe Scarborough said. "Her head was back, it was one of those fake phony campaign laughs that she does, where she throws her head back and you know it’s phony."
"In the short term, the echo chamber matters a lot," Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin said. "There’s no one inside the echo chamber who looks at these two new ads and goes wow, that’s awesome, that’s awe-inspiring."
Several members of the panel said that the Clinton campaign’s cautious and insular approach has contributed to the candidate’s shape-shifting image.
"If you’re cautious and everything about your campaign is focus-grouped and polled, you’re not being yourself," Halperin said.
"It feels a lot of the time like she knows she’s up by 40 points," co-host Willie Geist said. "[The approach seems to be,] don’t say anything to mess with that, don’t answer a question directly because you don’t have to, you can kind of obfuscate about things and be vague. I think that catches up with you eventually."