I don’t dislike Bill and Hillary Clinton but I do strongly prefer a world in which different people control the Democratic Party. If you were around here in 2008, you know my arguments and few of them have changed in the intervening years. Yet, for many years now, I’ve been basically reconciled to the fact that power within the party would transfer back to the Clintons even before Obama’s presidency is over. Once I saw Obama make peace with the offer of the State Department, I took my queue to make peace myself. If the president wasn’t going to fight a restoration, maybe it was better to try to influence it rather than resist it.
Still, this wasn’t a pleasant process for me and I had to resort to certain devices to make the medicine go down easier. The main idea I comforted myself with is that House Clinton has a different set of historical allies and that they have the potential to hold on to House Obama’s coalition while retaining some of the alliances that are unique to them.
The countering argument has always been that the old Clinton coalition is gone and can not be brought back. There’s no way that Hillary Clinton can compete in states like Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia that formed a spine of her husband’s electoral college map. She probably can’t even hold their historical base in Arkansas.
We don’t know which scenario will prove correct, yet, but it matters less for the outcome of the presidential race than it does for what can be done with presidency if it is actually won. If Hillary can win all but a few Obama states, she’ll win the Electoral College. But she won’t be able to do much in office except make foreign policy decisions (that I definitely do not trust her to make) unless she gets a more cooperative Congress and a more united electorate than Obama has enjoyed over the latter part of his terms in office.
There are probably several Democrats other than Hillary who could win the Electoral College, but I don’t think anyone other than House Clinton has the potential to change the whole landscape of our Blue-Red divide and possibly win back control of the House of Representatives before the post-2020 Census redrawing of districts.
So, for me, the only real appeal to a House Clinton restoration is their potential to bring about this kind of landslide reordering of our gridlocked politics. It’s not that I’d confidently predict that Hillary will accomplish this, only that she’s the only one I think could do it.
But she won’t do it unless she tries, and Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman are reporting in the New York Times that she isn’t going to try:
Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be dispensing with the nationwide electoral strategy that won her husband two terms in the White House and brought white working-class voters and great stretches of what is now red-state America back to Democrats.
Instead, she is poised to retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency: a campaign focused more on mobilizing supporters in the Great Lakes states and in parts of the West and South than on persuading undecided voters.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides say it is the only way to win in an era of heightened polarization, when a declining pool of voters is truly up for grabs. Her liberal policy positions, they say, will fire up Democrats, a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory — even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her.
The article is filled with quotes from Obama campaign veterans like David Plouffe, Dan Pfeiffer and (Clinton campaign manager) Robby Mook. They definitely know how to win presidential elections are worth listening to. They’ll tell you how to do a lot of the nuts and bolts stuff that made Team Obama one of the most formidable and talented political teams ever assembled. But their presumption is that you simply can’t persuade people to vote for you anymore. Your job, therefore, is primarily to identify and excite people who, if they actually show up, prefer your candidate.
Let me be clear about one thing. They’re probably correct. And, if they’re correct, whoever wins the Democratic nomination is basically locked in as the winner for the simple reason that they have a lot more voters in the right states to carry the Electoral College. Therefore, the safe thing to do is to follow their strategy, mobilize your base, and get them to the polls. Do that, and you’re the president.
Except, what then?
If that’s really the task, if it’s really that simple and you can accomplish all your goals that way, then I have no use for Hillary Clinton. If any Democrat can win, I’ll take one that has foreign policy instincts that I trust. And, for Hillary, if success is so assured, well I guess that is great. But does she want to be as hamstrung in office as Obama has been since the 2010 midterms? If that’s what she’s going to be dealing with, what can she accomplish that Bernie Sanders couldn’t accomplish? They’d both appoint judges and make executive orders. They’d both veto the same asinine legislation coming out of the Republican-led Congress. They’d both have half the country committed to the idea that they’re the spawn of Satan.
Now, I don’t want House Clinton to run some mealy-mouthed centrist campaign designed to warm the cockles of Sen. Joe Manchin’s heart, but I also don’t want Hillary to blow off efforts to organize in historic Clinton states and, especially, districts. I’d like to see her proceed on the assumption that she can win in places where other Democrats could not win rather than accept the common wisdom that this is an unnecessary risk and waste of resources.
Because if she can’t make the old Clinton districts and states competitive, there’s no reason for progressives to support her no matter how much she caters to us to get us to the polls. Why? Because she won’t be able to do anything more than Bernie Sanders once she gets in office, which is basically nothing.
If she would roll the dice on winning big with the risk that she might lose a sure thing, she might actually get a presidency worth having. And progressives might have a real reason to prefer her to the alternatives.
