On the left, at least, there’s been a near-universal condemnation of the Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman piece in the New York Times. Some of the commenters here and on Twitter have misinterpreted what I had to say about the article, so I want to make one thing clear right now, and then I want to revisit this issue when I have the time to pull together all the links I’ll need to discuss it intelligently.
What I was reacting to was not the criticism that Hillary Clinton is running a too-liberal campaign on the issues. I was reacting to the defeatism of the advisers around Clinton. If I thought that people vote in large numbers based on the careful messaging and policy-positioning of candidates, I’d think that these two things are related. But I don’t feel that way. There could be several million people in this country who would vote for Hillary and not for Barack regardless of anything that they might say.
Clinton appeals to certain people on a visceral level. So does Obama. But they’re not the same people. By positioning herself on the liberal side of the things, Clinton can hope to energize Obama voters who aren’t excited by her campaign, and there are fairly few voters who will be so turned off by her lack of centrist messaging that they’ll change their vote from Democratic to Republican. There’s nothing wrong with running a campaign that fires up the Democratic base. And that criticism of her in the Martin and Haberman piece is part concern-trolling and part just plain bad analysis.
Without doing anything specific, however, Clinton has a broader appeal than Obama. I don’t mean that she’s more popular in absolute terms, although she might be. I mean that there are voters out there available to her that simply weren’t available to Obama. Not all these voters are racist. Some just really like the idea of a female president. Some identify more with Clinton’s generation. Some remember the economy in the first Clinton presidency fondly and want more of the same. Some just trust the Clintons in a way that they never trusted a relatively unknown senator from Illinois. Maybe they like the Clintons’ southern roots or DLC past. Maybe they’ll remember the DLC stuff as a positive even if Hillary isn’t out pounding those old messages day after day.
The country has become too polarized, and it might be that Clinton can’t do anything about it. But, my argument is that she should compete in areas that her husband won. I don’t mean that she should run a centrist or anti-Obama campaign. She might not have to do any of that to have success in some of the places that her husband had success.
Anyway, for me, that’s the promise of Hillary Clinton. As I said before, I would not confidently predict that she can pull it off, but she’ll never know if she doesn’t try.
More later…