I THINK IT WAS IN NOVEMBER, 2008: When did America forget that it’s America? A lot of people did their best to help ensure that forgetfulness, though.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: With Hillary, Appearances Are Everything.

Every Mystery Machine must have its Velma. You’ll remember Velma Dinkley, the grim-faced young fogey of the Scooby-Doo gang: turtleneck and knee socks, orange; pleated skirt and pumps, red; spectacle lenses a very groovy shade of aqua; hair in a severe, LPGA-ready bob. She was the thick and bookish counterpoint to the comely Daphne Blake. But the id moves in mysterious ways, and Velma has enjoyed a strange post-1970s career as a minor object of erotic fixation, being portrayed on film by the knockout Linda Cardellini and, in a dramatic illustration of Rule 34, by the pornographic actress Bobbi Starr. . . .

Sharon Stone, the Clintons, Scooby-Doo, the man-feminists of the New York art scene, the just-one-name-like-Sting-or-Cher thing: That Hillary Show has a distinctly retro feel to it already. We have seen this movie before: Last Vegas, The Bucket List, About Schmidt, John Podesta and Paul Begala starring in Grumpy Old Men. Once more unto the breach. The Lion in Winter, with all the domestic friction and succession drama but no lion.

Herself, who speaks in clichés and who gives some indication that she thinks in them, too, says that she is in the van — “Road trip!” she tweeted — because she is “hitting the road to earn your vote.” The Clintons — not too long ago “dead broke,” as Herself put it — have earned well more than $100 million since the president left office, the Washington Post reports, with his speech income alone amounting to some $105 million.

That’s armored-car money, and an armored car is of course what Herself is riding around in, as she did during her first Senate campaign. There is something ineffably Clintonesque in that: She declined the use of the customary limousine because she wanted to appear to share the lives and troubles of the ordinary people, so she rides around in a customized armored van, having spent a great deal of money — starting prices for such vehicles are comparable to those of Porsches — to avoid the appearance that she has a great deal of money. . . .

Appearances apparently do matter. That van is the cosmetic surgery of populism, the tummy tuck of a 1 percenter auditioning for a role somewhere between Evita and Auntie Mame. But the Clintons have always had a strange knack for getting people to admire them for their phoniness, not in spite of it. Their admirers — and there are many of them — are like those odd ducks who prefer breast implants to the genuine articles, the more obviously artificial the better.

That’s the strange thing about the career of Herself: Because she is a feminist, or at least a woman who plays one on television, to bring up the subject of her appearance is taken as prima facie chauvinism, boorish boobishness of the sort that illustrates exactly why we need a woman as president. (Maybe. But this woman?) At the same time, appearance is 83 percent of every presidential campaign, and 97 percent — at least — of a Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. In some cases, the appeal is literally skin deep: When Team Herself unveiled its campaign icon — an uppercase “H” with a vector pointing to the right — the daft young actress Lena Dunham remarked that she wanted to get a “tramp stamp” tattoo of the logo.

Read the whole thing.

HMM: FBI agent testifies in Paula Broadwell cyberstalking case. “The FBI special agent who brought the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell cyberstalking case to the attention of law enforcement recently testified that the FBI handled the case under political pressure because of the 2012 presidential election, ‘marginalizing’ and making crude insinuations about the victim in the case, Jill Kelley, whom they cast as ‘some femme fatale.’ . . . Though the Kelleys were the victims of the original cyberstalking case, as the Petraeus scandal exploded in the public, Jill Kelley’s name was dragged through the mud by unnamed Obama administration and law enforcement officials and many in the media painted her in a particularly unflattering light, the subject of the Kelley’s lawsuit.”

SO WHY ARE PEOPLE LEAVING? Every year since 2002, Minnesota has been losing residents to other states. What’s worse: Young adults are leaving in the greatest numbers. My first thought was that the cold climate hurts, and that they should be embracing global warming. But the evidence doesn’t really support that: “About a third of Minnesota’s ‘leavers’ tend to move to the border states of Wisconsin (16 percent), North Dakota (12 percent) and Iowa (6 percent).” Those are all pretty cold places.

TERRY MCAULIFFE, LOYAL FLACK: Va. governor defends Clinton’s ‘dead broke’ comments. “I cannot tell you the distress in that family at that time, with all the issues and all the legal fees, banks refusing to even give them a mortgage.”

Plus, from Chuck Todd: “They had nothing compared to a lot of rich friends.” Well, when you hang out with a lot of billionaires, yes, you have nothing compared with them. That’s not the same as “dead broke” except in a narcissistic psychological sense.

MICKEY KAUS: “Your Dem Dogma at Work: How to raise the (stagnant) median wage? Economist Jared Bernstein will propose anything – apprenticeship programs! pre-K education! refundable child care credits! – except tightening the labor market by controlling the influx of immigrant workers. … P.S.: Bernstein also wants something called ‘fair chance hiring’ for job seekers with criminal records. It would certainly be good if those people could get jobs. But does Bernstein really think employers will ever hire Americans ‘with criminal records’ if they can instead hire eager workers from an inexhaustible stream of immigrants?”

Bernstein won’t address this because the real point of immigration is to bring in a generation of docile Democratic voters.

CLICK AT YOUR PERIL: The Hillary Laugh Button.