https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/06/07/scorched-earth-hillary-clinton-campaign/ Contentions
The Scorched Earth Hillary Clinton Campaign
Noah Rothman | @noahcrothman 06.07.2015 - 3:30 PM
For partisan Democrats, the Hillary Clinton campaign is an unstoppable juggernaut has the potential upend virtually every foundational assumption about American politics. But Clinton’s approach to campaigning for the presidency should cast doubt on the supposedly preternatural abilities of this figure that we have been so often told is a natural campaigner and a political virtuoso.
2014’s pro-Republican tsunami did little to temper the expectations shared by Democratic operatives that Hillary Clinton’s acumen would shift America’s political center of gravity measurably in the Democratic direction. In mid-November of last year, Mitch Stewart, President Barack Obama’s battleground state director and a senior strategist for the pro-Clinton PAC Ready for Hillary, was certain that the former secretary of state would not only win in 2016 but expand on even Barack Obama’s 2008 electoral map. States like Arizona, Missouri, Arkansas, and Georgia were in play, he told Talking Points Memo. “Where I think Secretary Clinton has more appeal than any other Democrat looking at running is that with white working-class voters, she does have a connection,” Stewart averred. “I think she’s best positioned to open those states.”
Team Clinton is today scaling back its lofty set of initial targets, but Democrats remain convinced that the former secretary is still best positioned to win the election in 2016 and take more than a handful of her fellow Democrats with her into high federal office. That inference can be drawn from the fact that the Democratic Party’s set of 2016 senatorial slate is composed of a number of top-tier candidates. When Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, Illinois Rep. Tammy Duckworth, and former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold revealed their intention to run for U.S Senate in 2016, they also indicated that they think Hillary Clinton will have coattails.
But the sincere confidence outwardly displayed by partisan Democrats contrasts mightily with what neutral observers are seeing from her admittedly nascent campaign.
Those wide-eyed liberal consultants who anticipated that Hillary Clinton’s legacy last name and her presumed appeal to working-class white voters, last observed in the wild circa 2008, would possibly turn states like Arkansas blue now seems like fancy. In fact, according to some reporting, Clinton’s campaign anticipates losing ground among white voters in 2016 even when compared with Barack Obama’s relatively poor showing among this demographic.
“[Clinton’s] strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign,” the Washington Post’s Anna Gearan observed last month. That’s not merely optimistic; it’s sanguine to the point of naïveté. Only 28 percent of the 2008 electorate was made up of minority voters, and the minority share of the electorate declined by two points four years later. “Clinton will have to expand Hispanic support, increase turnout among independent women and still hold on to a large share of black voters who were drawn to the first African American major-party nominee,” Gearan noted. And that’s precisely what Clinton has been doing.
As Jonathan Tobin noted, one of the central pillars of Clinton’s effort to revive Barack Obama’s coalition consists of fanning the flames of fear surrounding Republican support for voter identification laws. It doesn’t matter to Clinton that voter ID was upheld by the Supreme Court and is wildly popular, even among minority voters, she has cast these and other efforts as “voter suppression” and equated them Jim Crow era efforts to disenfranchise black voters. The fact that Clinton is deploying a tactic this cynical before she has even secured the nomination should not be inspiring confidence in Democrats.
Some Democratic strategists are starting to concede that Clinton’s pathway to the White House will be a narrow one. “If you run a campaign trying to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the electorate, you’re not going to run a very compelling campaign for the voters you need,” Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, David Plouffe, told the New York Times.
That admission, one that implicitly dismisses rural voters and traditionally Republican states, is troubling for those historians who fretted to the Times reporters that President Hillary Clinton will not enjoy the mandate she needs to govern if she does not run an inclusive and broad-based campaign for the presidency. Indeed, writing off a large portion of the electorate is what landed former GOP nominee Mitt Romney in hot water following the exposure of his now infamous comments about the “47 percent” of the electorate that receives federal benefits and thus would never support a Republican.
The Times noted that Clinton will have to run Obama’s campaign but, being unable to run as a post-partisan unifier in the way that Obama did in 2008, her path to the White House consists of driving Democratic base voters to the polls.
Mrs. Clinton and her husband expressed concern last year when Democratic turnout fell precipitously. Recognizing that Democrats had to be galvanized to show up at the polls, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers used surveys and focus groups to assess the risks of running a strongly liberal campaign. They concluded that there were few.
So she is embracing the central lesson of the Obama school: that voters turn out when they believe that an election makes a difference and that their party’s standard-bearer is a champion on issues important to them.
Clinton is already signaling that division and tribalism will characterize her run for the White House. If Democrats do buck historical trends and secure a third consecutive term in the Oval Office, it will be by narrow margins. Recognizing this, Clinton is ready to run the scorched Earth campaign that Barack Obama ran in 2012. But hers might even be more divisive and factional, pitting one demographic against another, in order to knit together a modest majority of American presidential voters. But what kind of a country will she inherit after such a dangerous and callous effort? What will be left to govern after Hillary Clinton has set fire to national comity in service to her insatiable ambition? We might soon find out.
