Bill Clinton has been intruding himself more and more into the campaign’s direction in the past few weeks. Look at the prominence (dominant male) he displays in recent-day Iowa photos at the podium with Hillary. However, rather than humanize her, I suspect that his direction will take her campaign further down the dirty political path of personal destruction against Bernie Sanders. That’s his idiom.
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It’s a loaded question, because “the Berniacs” are not some monolithic group, any more than Hillary supporters are (they aren’t). That being said, she is already starting to do some of the things that might help – moving towards his positions on things like Keystone XL and the TPP (just as he has moved some in her direction on guns) being more forceful in her overall critique of the “rigged economy,” overcharging (and government complicity in that) by Big Pharma, etc., etc. And just before Iowa her last couple of speeches were starting to take on, overall, a more populist tone. (And no, things like this will not sway “all” Bernie fans to her side, but the fact that you can never get 100% doesn’t mean don’t try for what you can get without losing more voters in some other way.)
So I think she and her team are in the process of figuring out how they can better appeal to folks who are attracted to Bernie’s campaign, both in an effort to win over some of them in the primaries, and also looking ahead to the desire to win as many as possible over for the general.
But what definitely doesn’t help in either regard, is things like loudly proclaiming that single payer health care will “never, ever come to pass,” attacking the very concept of single payer with Republican talking points, having Chelsea out there making it sound like Bernie is hell-bent on taking away health coverage from millions of Americans and leaving them twisting in the wind. Not to mention having David Brock (he of “a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty” fame), out there saying things like “black lives don’t matter to Bernie Sanders” or comparing Bernie to authoritarian dictators. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t do herself any favors with Bernie voters by having her spokesman make the ridiculous claim that Bernie “is running the most negative campaign of any Democratic primary candidate” in the history of the country. I mean at some point, some Bernie voters, right or wrong, are just going to conclude that she must be as morally bankrupt as such tactics would suggest.
So it may be just as much (or more) about what she needs to not do. Which is tough, because up to now, her game plan for dealing with the Bernie insurgency seems to have been Plan A, simply ignore (until he made a little to much progress), then straight to Plan B, amp up the negative attacks…including some real shark-jumping ones like Brock’s (which, by the way, her campaign declined to apologize for, or even disavow). Neither A nor B is going to help her much with Bernie supporters, although B is obviously much worse.
I have seen some signs of a Plan C – incorporate more of his tone, themes and message in her own campaign – but to make that work, she needs to try a lot harder to restrict her criticism (yes, criticism is necessary and perfectly appropriate, if done right) to more factually defensible stuff. For example “I agree with Bernie’s goal of universal coverage, but I have a different approach to getting there and here’s why” can be a powerful argument (and one she’s made pretty well at times), without being a dishonest, counterproductive-to-party-unity one. Whereas claiming Bernie would “strip millions and millions and millions of Americans of their health coverage” or having the founder of one of her SuperPACs out there Tweeting that “black lives don’t matter to Bernie,” those are the exact opposite – they may well lose her more votes in the primary than they gain her, and they will definitely convince (and probably already have) some Bernie voters that she’s just not to be trusted. A fair amount of damage has already been done with these kinds of way-off-the-mark attacks, and out-of-step-with-Democratic-voters positioning, such as her absolutist declaration (vow?) that single payer will “never, ever come to pass.”
So the first order of business would be to stop digging herself into a deeper hole with Bernie voters – that way her attempts to climb out of that hole have at least some chance of success.
(By the way, the polling I’ve seen on this question shows a not-so-much-smaller percentage of of Hillary voters who say they may not vote for Bernie in the general – which, if he gets far enough, leaves him the same issue of how do you differentiate yourself assertively for the primary, while not unnecessarily losing supporters of your primary opponent who you want to come support you in the general. So, in fairness, one could make a very similar argument about some of Bernie’s harder-edged rhetoric, for example about her speaking fees.)
Your question was a good one. I realize that I can’t possibly answer it in full (probably no one can). But I think the overall points I raised here are useful ones to consider, and I hope (and am cautiously optimistic) that Team Hillary may now be considering these or similar points.
[Standard Disclaimer: This commenter wishes it to be known that in November he or she plans to vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be, and will encourage their fellow primary candidate supporters to do likewise.]
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Indeed. See my response to brooklyndweller, immediately above this comment.
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My 40 year old daughter is for Clinton. She workes in the drug industry and is soundly behind Clinton. Don!t recall Sanders putting out a solution to the drug cost problem
My husband and I, both retirees, live off of Soc Sec and wall street investments. It is a fallacy to say she caters to wall street. Yes she did get money from them when she was their Senator and has some contributions from them now but their contributions pale in comparison to what they give the GOP. She did put out a detailed proposal regulating Wall street. She does not cater to them and it deals with shadow banking with the industry paying for their regulation. Bernie’s suggestion does not deal with shadow banking, which was the culprit during the recession.
He does not deal with our gun problem, women’s issues (no one touches 40 plus years of fighting for women). Just saying. Glad our daughters are engaged in the process.
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A bit harsh, but I think there is some truth to that. It’s not that she doesn’t try, and I’m more than willing to believe that she does actually care about poor people, working people, the struggling, failing lower-middle-class, and so on. She just doesn’t know very many of these folks, or interact with them much in ways not mediated by supportive organizations. She has lived an extremely privileged life, all her life, and frankly, sometimes it really shows (for example her incredibly tone-deaf claim that she knows something about economic struggle because she and Bill were “flat broke” when they left the White House – as if the rest of us should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps by booking speeches to Wall Street firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars!).
To be fair, one could say that Bernie has lived a pretty privileged life (though obviously less so than Hillary) for most of his adult life, and especially for the last few decades – but there is no getting around the fact that Bernie does come from a poor, working class family, and clearly has never forgotten what it was like for his parents to struggle, really struggle day to day to feed their family and pay their rent and somehow get their kids to and through college, all while staving off any of a number of financial or heath or employment or family misfortunes that could unravel their already barely-making-it existence. This is not something he has forgotten, and it shows.
And while it’s easy to write off Vermont as lily white and imagine it to be some cushy, upper-middle-class state, in reality there is no lack of poverty, real grinding poverty, in both the (small) cities, and in many of the more rural areas of the state (especially the “Northeast Kingdom”). While Hillary has spent much of her life hob-nobbing with the wealthy (in between doing some very good things for the poor, I would hasten to add), Bernie has spent a lot more of his time with and around people of much more modest means, and, at least in my opinion, seems to empathize based on much closer personal experience. Which is not necessarily Hillary’s fault as such (she didn’t choose to be born into a privileged life any more than Bernie chose to be born into his less-privileged one), but nonetheless it provides an authenticity and a deep understanding, that is just really hard (maybe impossible) for someone who has been so much a part of the wealthy elite, and for so long, to match.
In short, by comparison to Hillary, Bernie started out much more in touch – on a visceral level – with the struggles and needs and concerns of the poor and the working class – and he’s stayed that way. Hillary may mean just as well, she may understand the numbers just as well as he does, but it seems pretty clear that he just “gets it” in a fundamental, visceral way that she just doesn’t (or a least it often seems like she doesn’t). And voters pick up on that.
In a nutshell, I think this explains a good deal of Bernie’s appeal, and why Hillary is struggling (at least a bit) to cope with his candidacy. He’s selling something a lot of Democrats are buying, and while she has a competing product for that market, his is seen as the real deal, hers as a cheap knock-off (not by everyone, of course, but among people who are attracted to Bernie’s message, which is the subgroup we’re talking about).
I don’t know what to suggest for her, how she could come close to matching his intensity and authenticity on these issues (maybe she can’t) but she has to at least try, because that’s where a good deal of the Democratic base, and a large number of Americans beyond that, are coming from on these issues. As Bernie likes to remind Alan Greenspan, “the country club set” and “the cocktail party set” ARE, in fact “way out of touch.” To the extent that Hillary is much more a part of that world, and much less a part of the world of everyday struggles, she starts out with a big deficit in the authenticity / “understands and cares about the problems of people like me” metric. How she can best try to bridge that gap? I won’t pretend to have all the answers. But she has to try, at least to the extent she can.
[Standard Disclaimer: This commenter wishes it to be known that in November he or she plans to vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be, and will encourage their fellow primary candidate supporters to do likewise.]
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What could Clinton do and/or say that to get the Berniacs on board?
That is exactly the problem. Clinton will do or say anything for votes. When she runs on Sanders’ ideas, she sounds like a complete phony. That’s because she IS a complete phony. Sanders’ main agenda is a threat to Clinton’s Wall Street PAC funders. She cannot bite the hand that feeds her.
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If that’s the way they use Bill, then they are committing political malpractice. Because, yeah, he could be quite the street-fighter, but that’s not what is called for in this primary campaign (and I agree, could probably hurt her more than it could help her). And as it turns out, his other great strength – his ability to “emote” his compassion for those who are truly struggling, and his ability to weave that into a broad, sweeping, inspirational appeal to right and wrong – were some of his biggest assets in his own campaigns and presidency (with which I still have a lot of problems, but give the guy his due, he could inspire the hell out of people…in a way we really haven’t seen from Hillary yet).
So yes, the “Big Dog” could be very helpful to Hillary’s primary campaign, but not by being a designated attack dog, growling and barking, or lifting his leg at Bernie, but by helping Hillary (if he can) learn to be a bit more like Bill was on the campaign trail in terms of being able to convey real concern for the poor and struggling (and not only by specific racial or ethnic category), and wrapping that into an overarching narrative that speaks to where the country is now, where it seems to be heading, and where it ought to be heading.
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Unfortunately, H. Clinton has nowhere near the kind of charisma and inspiration of B. Clinton. However, I can look beyond that.
I agree that the strident tone she took on single payer was wrong. I agree with her that it will not happen (or, at least for a very long time) but that’s no reason to come down like a ton of bricks on the subject. I think she needs to emphasize (more than she is now) that gov’t. can make the health care process more fair and affordable with more regulation. I think she needs to counter Sanders with alternatives to the revolution that sound plausible.
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Well, there’s that half of the problem. But I think the other half is just as important, which is that one thing both Bernie Sanders and Bill Clinton have in common (and Hillary doesn’t) is that Bill, like Bernie, was raised in a struggling working class family, and seems to understand poverty and struggle on a visceral level that Hillary, despite her laudable work with the Children’s Defense Fund, charities too numerous to mention, and on and on, just never seems to have fully absorbed. And perhaps that’s just asking too much to expect that kind of deep understanding to even be possible without experiencing it firsthand.
But, to whatever extent she can, she needs to get in touch with that side of the American experience, and learn to speak to it in the kind of direct, unequivocal way Bernie does. But that still leaves the authenticity question – Bernie sounds pissed off about the many outrages he names that are being committed against the poor and working class and middle class of this country every day, because he IS pissed off about them, and mightily so. Is Hillary? Or it it just the latest pose for her? I realize that’s harsh, but I think that does sum up the dynamic she faces there.
But even if she can’t/won’t go as far as Bernie does in his overarching vision and his sweeping proposals (which she won’t, and arguably shouldn’t) she has to move at least some distance in that direction, to the best of her ability. At least that’s my opinion of her best chance to both hold onto supporters who may be attracted to Bernie as the primary campaign continues, and to win the support of as many of his supporters as possible if she is the nominee. How far she can go in doing that, without losing too much of her experience/pragmatist/moderate appeal, is an open question, and a potential limiting factor. There’s a line to be walked there…but she’s still way over on one side of it, IMHO.
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