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Personal emotional responses to Hillary Clinton constitute a debate that continues to simmer on an internet politics forum to which I subscribe. The battle lines show a sharp gender division. Men in the forum may or may not like Clinton personally, and may or may not like her politics; many can distinguish between the two issues. Women in the forum are universally behind her, feel she is treated unfairly by the media, and can’t understand why anyone might dislike her.

Even setting aside the right-wing attack dogs, news media often treat Clinton unfairly. For example, she’s often caught between the rock of a “hard-assed bitch” label and the hard place of a “typical emotional woman” label, or charged—by the same people who embraced Bush the lesser!—as undeserving of office, winning one only through family influence. That doesn’t mean every obstacle she finds in media coverage is unfair. Asking Clinton tough questions, like how she can justify voting for the Patriot Act, is not a sexist attack; it’s healthy political discourse, and an attempt at public accountability.

The likeability question is far more slippery. The women participating in this particular forum, unable to understand why someone may not like her personally, leap to the conclusion that the distaste must be unjustified. In the interests of making a negative emotional response to Clinton more plausible, I offer my own emotional response to a candidate poll.

On Dec 26, the Rockford Register Star printed an AP poll of the candidates: what food do you hate? This is a complete and utter “fluff” question, entirely without political merit. I use it precisely because it is fluff, because no sane person would base their vote on a question of what food a candidate dislikes, or what the candidate claims to dislike, and so remove my political prejudices from the analysis.

In brief, the answers were:

Clinton: none, really.
Edwards: mushrooms.
Richardson: mushrooms.
Obama: beets.
Giuliani: liver.
Huckabee: carrots.
Romney: eggplant.

Clinton’s response in full reads: “I like nearly everything. I don’t like, you know, things that are still alive.”

My instantaneous reaction was: what a fake. Even to an utterly meaningless question, the answer seems crafted for political effect. In that instant, I read it as “I don’t want to piss off the mushroom, beet, and eggplant growers, or the sushi enthusiasts, or anything immigrant families love, or accidentally mention an official state vegetable. What do you like? Yes, I like that, too. Oh, and I’m PETA-friendly.”

This gut reaction passed, and reason returned quickly to the fore. Clinton was surely not thinking the words I just put into her mouth, and her claim not to like eating things that are still alive is surely true. Still, reason could only excuse her non-answer only so far. Everyone has foods they dislike. My wife eats damned near everything, from fermented fish paste to the cartilaginous ends of chicken bones to the plastic strips you’re supposed to peel off of sliced bologna, and even she has a food she will not eat and cannot bring herself to like (celery). Instead of just sharing with a curious public a bit of her personality, she reflexively replied in a way designed to agree with everyone. A lifetime of politics does that to people, training them to give a safe answer before an honest one. But come on. Playing safe about yucky vegetables?

That answer wasn’t even the smart one: Bush the elder scored a few points with an unsympathetic public when he disparaged broccoli; it made him seem more human, more like someone we could all relate to. But Clinton couldn’t help herself. It took the exhaustion of a grueling Iowa primary to break down that shell enough for Clinton to show some humanity, and even then, the shell was right back up seconds later. True story: Clinton’s instantaneous lapse of composure won support among voters generally for exposing a human side, but the woman who triggered the little jag went on to vote for Obama; she saw more of the exchange, and was put off by seeing Clinton return to a crafted public mask to consider the catch in Clinton’s voice genuine.

Multiply that insignificant moment by hundreds of brief, individually meaningless episodes: interviews, stump speeches, non-binding congressional resolutions, debate quips, responses to fluff questions. Collectively, moments like that—and Clinton is pretty consistent in her noncommittal behavior—create a strong perception of artificiality. The nature of the artificiality of this particular case feeds, rightly or wrongly, into an emotional sense that Democrats work so hard at including everyone that they can’t or won’t get anything done, and that they place each demographic constituency’s feelings ahead of objective truth. Writ large, it reflects both Clintons’ style of government by opinion poll, which has produced some disastrous results, including voting for war in Iraq and approving the Patriot Act, according to whichever ways the political winds were blowing at the time, instead of moral imperatives.

Before I’m accused of overstating the case, let me explicitly recognize that a tiny bit of waffling on a fluff question is no proof of unfitness for the presidency, nor even that a candidate is dislikeable. Nobody should judge Clinton by her claim, quite possibly true, to eat nearly everything. I don’t want to proceed from a fluff poll to any sweeping statements; I merely call it up as concrete example, representative of a consistent pattern of a palpably artificial personality. All successful politicians need to craft such a personality to some degree, and Clinton is no exception. But she lacks a talent for making that artificial personality feel genuine. Many people pick up on that, and dislike her for it. It has nothing to do with sexism; Mitt Romney gives off the same creepy “fake” vibe, and suffers even more for it in the polls.

Male or female, Democrat or Republican, politicians have a reputation for agreeing with everyone, but failing to serve their constituents once in office. Clinton’s voting record justifies such a reputation in her case. But for those who want to set aside her actual career and embrace her for emotional reasons, I think it’s important to recognize that Clinton’s emotional appeal is not universal, even among fair-minded voters, nor is there any reason to think it should be.