http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/hillary-clinton-narrative-trump-223305 Clinton campaign wrestles with how to attack Trump
Defining Donald is harder than it looks.
By Annie Karni
05/18/16 05:18 AM EDT
Donald Trump is a train wreck.
He’d be an utter disaster for women.
Latinos would be crushed under his rich-get-richer tax plan.
His refusal to release his tax returns suggests his net worth is less than the $10 billion he claims.
He could start a nuclear arms race and equip terrorists with weapons to destroy the United States.
Even Republicans don’t want him. He’s a “loose cannon,” unpredictable and just “too risky” to be president.
Those are just a few of the opening salvos in the Hillary Clinton campaign’s initial attempts to define the presumptive Republican nominee.
In the early days of the Clinton-Trump showdown, there’s been no shortage of attack lines, or campaign surrogates eager to deliver them. But a potential obstacle is already emerging, one that 16 Republicans have failed to overcome this year: creating a coherent narrative to define a candidate who seems to blunder from one negative headline to the next with no permanent scars to show for it.
“Our problem is a target-rich environment,” said one Clinton ally, who noted that every day this week the news cycle was dominated by seemingly damaging headlines about Trump.
“Right now, they’re doing a little bit of everything to see what works,” explained President Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, noting that the stakes are low because the campaign has yet to put any money behind its attacks.
But the central challenge, he said, already has been revealed: maintaining message discipline at the negative headline buffet that is Trump.
“You can spend all day, every day, going after a hundred different things, and those things can add up to less than one hundred,” Pfeiffer said. “They may not weave into a narrative, or you may not be able to drive any one of them for long enough. You need discipline.”
For all his flaws as a candidate, Trump has proved to be incredibly disciplined in branding his rivals. His nickname “Little Marco” skillfully demeaned the presidential qualities of Sen. Marco Rubio. “Low-energy Jeb” planted the idea in Republican primary voters’ minds that Jeb Bush wasn’t up to the job. And his new focus on “Crooked Hillary” plays on one of the Democratic front-runner’s biggest vulnerabilities as a candidate: trust.
“He’s going to hammer ‘Crooked Hillary’ the whole time,” Pfeiffer added. “To me, the biggest fear is young people will feel like it doesn’t really matter. They may not turn out.”
Clinton has been less successful at defining her primary challenger. The underestimated Sanders campaign grew into a nationwide movement before Clinton’s eyes and drove much of the discourse in the Democratic primary.
Now, as Clinton seeks to define Trump at an early stage in the general election, her campaign appears to be in a phase of seeing what sticks. Last week, Clinton and her surrogates tried out several disparate lines of attack.
“What’s really clear,” Neera Tanden, Clinton’s former top policy adviser, said on a conference call with reporters, “is Donald Trump has made it entirely clear throughout the entirety of his campaign that he would be a terrible choice for women voters.”
That clarion message, however, was not amplified the next day. Instead, the follow-up was a call with Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who urged reporters to “think about what Trump’s plans mean for Latinos. Middle-class Americans and Latinos would pay the price for his reckless quest to continue enriching the billionaires.”
Clinton herself chose to highlight a third issue while stumping in New Jersey, where she surprised her aides by uncharacteristically engaging with an audience member who yelled out a question about Trump’s tax returns.
“You’ve got to ask yourself,” she responded from the stage, “why doesn’t he want to release them? Yeah, well, we’re going to find out.”
And on Monday night, at a speech at the Asia Society in Manhattan, Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, painted a frightening picture of Trump as commander in chief. His comments that more countries should be able to obtain nuclear weapons, Sullivan said, have “the very real risk of sparking a nuclear arms race.”
Clinton campaign officials said the common thread of the attacks so far is that they underscore the idea that Trump is “too risky to be president.”
But Clinton allies are not even on the same page yet about that theme.
“I frankly don’t think ‘risky’ captures it, because ‘risk’ implies potential upside,” Priorities USA chief strategist Guy Cecil said Monday while unveiling the PAC’s first television ads attacking Trump.
Other Clinton allies said they worry Trump’s daily distractions will make it difficult for that message to sink in. “I follow closely and couldn’t tell you what she’s been talking about,” said one top Democrat with ties to the campaign. “They literally need to consult a psychiatrist about how you unravel a clinical narcissist.”
Clinton surrogate and Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen admitted there has been “some reticence to get the daily Trump assault started. Once it starts, it’s hard to pull back. I don’t think anyone has quite settled on the right formula for how much of the Trump pushback is from Hillary, and how much is from surrogates.”
She added: “There’s just so much material and he jumps around on so many issues. Finding the balance between responding to his crazy policy inconsistencies and putting your own anti-Trump message out there is a constant set of choices. There’s just so much material, it’s hard to choose.”
Rosen compared the campaign with Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run, when the daily mantra was so simple it was written on the wall at the Little Rock campaign headquarters: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
This time, said Rosen, “The tagline will be, ‘Women make the difference.’”
If so, that has not been conveyed yet to Clinton allies who appear on television on behalf of the campaign. “I’m winging it,” one surrogate said. “They don’t know yet what narrative they’re forming against him, and the story needs to be written well before the convention.”
Another problem confronting the Clinton campaign is how to stay on offense against a candidate who drives the news cycle simply by calling in to television morning shows, or firing off a provocative tweet.
On Tuesday, for example, while campaigning in Puerto Rico, Bill Clinton was asked to respond to Trump’s tweet calling him the “WORST woman abuser of all time.”
“No. I won’t,” he said. “I think people are smart enough to figure this out without my help.”
Hillary Clinton, Democrats said, also needs to make Trump respond to her. “There has to be some tiger team within the Clinton campaign that focuses entirely, all day, every day, on what can we do to make Donald Trump respond to us,” Pfeiffer said. “Is it a video? Is it something Hillary does herself? Will Bill Clinton do it? Your days are so all consuming that if you don’t dedicate some special team whose job it is, it won’t happen.”
However, Jeb Bush’s former communications director and anti-Trump activist, Tim Miller, warned against over-thinking strategy.
“Hillary has the advantage of being able to fight Trump on turf that benefits her,” said Miller, referring to a general election environment as opposed to a Republican primary. “She can fight him on issues where the electorate is with her.”
Miller said Bush struggled because “on the big, driving conversations, Trump really had the primary electorate with him. If I was Hillary, I would really home in on making Trump completely unacceptable to college-educated women, minorities, African-Americans, millennials, and never lose sight of that ball. That is their big advantage in this race.”
