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Body Language Read of Hillary Clinton

I was interviewed by a National Online News Writer for Sinclair Broadcast Group  on what seemed to be a tense exchange between Hillary Clinton and reporters yesterday about her emails, and her facial expressions and hand gestures which seemed particularly animated during the conversation.  Below are the links that I viewed.  My comments and insights appear below highlighted in yellow and the link to the article is at the end of the article.

http://kutv.com/news/nation-world/asked-if-she-wiped-email-server-clinton-says-what-like-with-a-cloth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rKZ66HjMQ&feature=youtu.be

Clinton losing ground in polls; body language suggests "Servergate" frustration
By Stephen Loiaconi Wednesday, August 19th 2015

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at the at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding at the Surf Ballroom Friday, Aug. 14, 2015, in Clear Lake, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Riede

Hillary Clinton released a new campaign ad Wednesday aimed at the theme of rebuilding the middle class as questions continue to swirl around her emails and a new poll suggests the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination is losing ground to rivals in both parties.
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“The deck is stacked in favor of those at the top…We need to have people believing that their work will be rewarded, so I’m going to do everything I can to try to get that deck reshuffled so being middle class means something again,” Clinton says in the ad.
The focus on economic themes comes a day after a heated exchange with reporters over questions about Clinton’s use of a private email server during her term as secretary of state.
Asked by a reporter whether she wiped the server’s data before turning it over to the FBI, Clinton joked, “What, like with a cloth?”
Following Clinton’s comments, the Republican National Committee began offering a “Secret Server Wiper” on its website for $5, a cloth with an inversion of Clinton’s campaign logo on it.
“Do you have a secret server you need to wipe clean? Having trouble clearing out those pesky Top Secret emails? Well Hillary's got just the thing: the Secret Server Wiper,” the product description states.
Republican frontrunner Donald Trump attacked Clinton over the email issue with an Instagram video earlier this week.
"Look, it's ether criminal or incompetent, it's one or another... either gross incompetence or criminal, and neither's acceptable to be president," Trump said in an interview with CNN Wednesday.
Clinton has maintained that she did not send emails containing classified information or receive emails with information that was marked as classified. Investigators have not accused her of any wrongdoing or established that anything criminal occurred, but the inspector general for the intelligence community has claimed that several emails included classified information.
Body language experts who analyzed video of Clinton’s brief question-and-answer session with reporters Tuesday said she displayed signs of frustration and anger when challenged about the server.
“What’s interesting is her gestures are very expansive, very large and away from her body” earlier in the press conference, said Patti Wood of Communication Dynamics. “That’s a very confident baseline. She was feeling very good about what she was saying.”
When Fox News reporter Ed Henry pressed Clinton about the server, her gestures became “more striking and forceful and weapon-like.”
“All of that shows a desire to retreat from the truth or retreat from how she was being questioned. She didn’t want to go off script at all,” Wood said.
A new CNN/ORC poll suggests an increasing number of Democratic voters have reservations about Clinton as well.
47% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents said they support Clinton, a drop of 9 points from last month. 29% backed Bernie Sanders, up 10 points from July, and 14% picked Vice President Joe Biden, who has not announced whether he will run. The poll also shows that a majority of Democrats want Biden in the race.
Among all voters, Clinton’s unfavorability rose to 53%, the highest since 2001. In a general election match-up with Republican candidates, Clinton leads Donald Trump and Scott Walker by 6 points, Jeb Bush by 9 and Carly Fiorina by 10.
Schmidt said when Clinton’s numbers fall below 50% with Democrats, as this poll indicates, “the red lights start going off in her campaign organization.”
Although the numbers should raise concern for Clinton, Whalen said Democrats are still in a strong position for the general election because they lead with women, Latinos and African-Americans. Republicans, and particularly Trump, could have trouble appealing to those demographics regardless of who the Democratic nominee is.
Carroll pointed to another significant finding in the poll, that 56% of voters now say Clinton did something wrong by using a private email server as secretary of state, including a majority of independents.
It is not too late for Biden, or even Gore, to get in the race, the experts said, but they saw few other potential candidates in the Democratic Party.
“It’s kind of shocking Democrats don’t have a deeper bench…It’s kind of like the golden oldies tour,” Whalen said.
“A lot of Democrats are getting very skittish,” Schmidt said, with fears that Clinton’s campaign will fall apart like it did in 2008 without a strong alternative like Barack Obama waiting in the wings.
“If there is a catastrophic crash, someone needs to be there to pick up and take flight.”
Carroll said the biggest challenge for Biden jumping into the race now is that so many of the party’s big donors have already thrown financial support behind Clinton.
“There’s not a lot of fish out there to reel in for him…but that doesn’t mean he can’t do it.”
With her support slipping, Carroll questioned the strategy behind the Clinton campaign’s new ad.
“I find the ad sort of equally tin-eared as her responses in the press conference,” he said.
Going after the ultra-rich when Clinton herself is very wealthy—the Daily Mail Wednesday highlighted the “$100,000-a-week Hamptons home” where she plans to vacation this month—could be problematic, according to Carroll. She may be seen as criticizing affluent people for acting like the rules do not apply to them, when that is exactly what voters believe she did with her private email server.
Schmidt had not seen the new ad, but he said the idea of playing up the theme of middle class insecurities is not a bad one.
“She needs to focus on those and hammer away on those,” he said, and just hope concerns about her emails and her trustworthiness subside in the coming months.
Democrats still seem to expect Clinton to be the party’s nominee, but Carroll said another candidate could catch fire with voters quickly like Obama did in 2008, especially if Clinton’s trust issues do continue to dog her.
“This has potential to be some huge acid flashback for Hillary Clinton where she goes from inevitable to the sidelines.”

Link to the actual article:


Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.