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Showing posts with label Body Language Read of Hillary Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Body Language Read of Hillary Clinton. Show all posts

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's Body Language in Second Debate, Apology, Smiles and Lion Behavior

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By Kevin Uhrmacher and Lazaheir lecterns, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were able to roam the stage at Sunday night’s presidential debate. And while the spoken insults and accusations will provide much fodder for political analysts in the days ahead, we invited two body language experts to dissect the candidates’ nonverbal cues.Here’s a bit about the experts, whose lightly edited thoughts about the debate are below:David Givens, who is the director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies, a nonprofit research center in Spokane, Wash. Givens also contributed to this helpful dissection of Clinton and Trump’s body language before the debate.

Patti Wood, author of the book “SNAP: Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language, and Charisma.” Wood has experience analyzing body language as it relates to anger, gender roles and apologies, which all proved helpful during the 90-minute spectacle.



The candidates walked out and, in a break with tradition, did not shake hands. Wood offered a thought about why it is so important. “A handshake … signals we are equals. Now we can come out fighting,” she wrote in an email Sunday night. The candidates did eventually shake hands, but not until the close of the debate.

‘He circles like a lion’: Trump declares his dominance
Looking to reverse his fortunes after a week on the defensive, Trump demanded attention with a display of aggressive sniffing, interruptions and emphatic pointing. But, compared with the last debate, “Donald was quite relaxed and calm,” Givens said.
“Trump came forth in full alpha-male mode,” The Post’s Karen Tumulty wrote after the debate. The experts agreed. Trump repeatedly pointed at Clinton as he lobbed accusations at her, a gesture Givens called “aggressive in all cultures.” He also compared Trump’s snorts with “a bull in attack mode.”

“I think the anger actually worked for him,” Wood suggested after the debate. “That’s his superpower.” For Trump, anger helps establish dominance and has a strong appeal, especially for disaffected voters, she said, adding that Americans are often drawn to the candidate who appears stronger.

Givens: “Trump’s constant pacing and restless movements around the stage attracted attention from Hillary's words, and visually disrespected her physical presence on the stage, as in ‘I am big, you are small.’ Wood: “He circles her during her turn. He is like a lion: going in with a biting attack, then keeping his attack energy going by continuing to move and circle.”

Givens: “Sitting is submissive; standing up is assertive. He paces [during her turn] to stay in motion, taking visual attention away from Clinton and her words. … His main message is ‘I am here, see me.’ “
Givens: “His manner of leaning hands and arms on the back of his chair as Hillary spoke was aggressive, too, as in a ‘broadside display’ of power. [It’s] common in the vertebrate world of males showing the biggest, widest parts of their bodies to intimidate rivals.”

Commenting on Trump’s ‘apology’ for the lewd 2005 video first reported by The Post on Oct. 7:
Wood: “Trump attacked Bill Clinton when he had a chance to apologize. A true apology does not include an attack.”Wood: “Clinton smiled as she began to respond to the Bill attack. [That] signals she was ready and confident. Her voice as she delivered was the strongest and angriest I have heard.”
Clinton stumbles on the smile
While Wood approved of Clinton’s performance overall, she said Clinton’s smile looked inappropriate. Both experts also thought Clinton looked comparatively weak when she sat as Trump spoke. Wood: “She stayed calm and even through most of the debates. His circling and staying close to her did not affect her, as scary as it looked to us.”
Givens: “Hillary addressed listeners sympathetically, with positive feelings and positive regard.”

Clinton reacts to Trump’s statement about using a special prosecutor to look into her “situation.” Reacting to Trump’s statements about her email scandal Trump criticizes Clinton saying she is “all talk” Both candidates react to a question asking for “one positive thing you respect in one another.”
Wood: “Because I've been analyzing her body language for a long time, I know her baseline … I think [the smile] was okay in the first debate [since] Trump rambled and had run-on sentences. [He] often did not make sense, so smiling seemed appropriate to communicate that she felt it was funny.”
The second debate was different, Wood said, because Trump spoke in more complete sentences and lobbed more serious accusations her way. This made it feel less natural for Clinton to crack a big smile.
Advice for the next debate
Trump should hew closer to his second debate performance, where he was more consistent across the entire 90 minutes, Wood said.
For Clinton, she offered some counterintuitive advice: Continue to break the rules. This may sound familiar to people who have worked in a corporate setting, Wood said. “A powerful person often breaks the rules.” (Think of the boss who shows up late to meetings.)

If Trump continues to flout the debate guidelines in the Oct. 19 debate, but Clinton sticks to her allotted time, she could look weak by comparison. Wood said she should monitor Trump and continue to establish power by going over her time limits if necessary.

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.”

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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.