STAGED : Hillary Clinton Champion of the People Campaign Staff Drove "ordinary Americans"

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is off to a bumpy start in her "Scooby" van. Stopping by Jones Street Coffee House in LeClaire, Iowa for a "surprise" visit along with some other "unannounced campaigning" after her much praised appearence at Kirkwood Community College. The Des Moines Register treated her almost like royalty, CNN couldn't get enough either, while New York Magazine was a little less fawning:

Hillary Clinton Meets Voters In Iowa Coffee Shop

8 Actually Spontaneous Moments From Hillary’s First Day in Iowa

Tuesday Clinton spent her first full day on the campaign trail in Iowa. Many details meant to convey a more casual tone, like people calling her "Hillary" and the impromptu stops for coffee, were actually carefully planned out by her aides. But despite their best efforts, there were some real unscripted moments on the campaign trail.

1) Clinton started the day with a stop at the Jones Street Coffee House in Le Claire. After asking for drink recommendations, she ordered a masala chai tea and a "caramellow" latte. According to the AP, she then announced she's ready to "drink my way across Iowa." Uh, phrasing.

2) Meanwhile, students at Kirkwood Community College in Monticello — who were handpicked by the school's administrators — waited for their chance to chat with the candidate. The New York Times reports that a Clinton aide instructed them to "address her not as 'Madame Secretary' but as 'Hillary.'"

3) Some Kirkwood students who were deemed unfit to engage in informal banter with Clinton were locked in their classrooms. You may read the rest of the New York piece here

The UK Daily Mail was even less enamored of Clinton's "spontaneous" actions:

Hillary Clinton's astroturf candidacy is in full swing in Iowa.

Her Tuesday morning visit to a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa was staged from beginning to end, according to Austin Bird, one of the men pictured sitting at the table with Mrs. Clinton.

Bird told Daily Mail Online that campaign staffer Troy Price called and asked him and two other young people to meet him Tuesday morning at a restaurant in Davenport, a nearby city.

Price then drove them to the coffee house to meet Clinton after vetting them for about a half-hour.

The three got the lion's share of Mrs. Clinton's time and participated in what breathless news reports described as a 'roundtable'– the first of many in her brief Iowa campaign swing.

Bird himself is a frequent participant in Iowa Democratic Party events. He interned with President Obama's 2012 presidential re-election campaign, and was tapped to chauffeur Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 when he visited Davenport.

'What happened is, we were just asked to be there by Troy,' Bird said Wednesday in a phone interview.

'We were asked to come to a meeting with Troy, the three of us, at the Village Inn.'

The other two, he confirmed, were University of Iowa College Democrats president Carter Bell and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland employee Sara Sedlacek.

'It was supposed to be a strategy meeting,' Bird recalled, 'to get our thoughts about issues. But then all of a sudden he says, "Hey, we have Secretary Clinton coming in, would you like to go meet her?"'

'And then we got in a car – Troy's car – and we went up to the coffee house, and we sat at a table and then Hillary just came up and talked with us.'

Bird said 'we all were called.'

'I mean, Troy asked us all to do – to go to a meeting with him. And we didn't really know what it was about. I mean, he did. He knew.'

It's unclear how many Iowans featured in photographs with Clinton that rocketed around the country on Tuesday were planted.

'The mayor of LeClaire was there, and his wife was there,' Bird said, recalling the scene at the coffee shop.

Price was executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party until a month ago. Clinton's team tapped him last week to be its political director in Iowa.

He did not respond to a request for comment.

Bird is a government and community relations coordinator at Genesis Health System in Davenport, Iowa, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A coworker at Genesis said Wednesday that Bird is 'basically a lobbyist in training. That's what he wants to do.'

Bird disagreed, saying his role was 'more public relations.' Read More

Oh the spontaneity, the humility, the sincerity, it almost makes me think she really IS "The People's Champion" Or have I been eating paint chips again?