Clinton launches in Obama's shadow
As she kicks off her campaign (again), a big question lingers: Can Hillary inspire the voters she needs to win?
By GLENN THRUSH and ANNIE KARNI
Hillary Clinton's campaign is ready to go. The fired-up part is still a work in progress.
Clinton will officially kick off her 2016 bid for the White House this morning on New York's Roosevelt Island, a sedate, middle-class enclave lashed by the currents of the East River. It's here she's hoping to start a wave of her own, a movement that connects her to FDR's liberal warrior legacy and heralds her intention to become the country's first woman president.
But generating enthusiasm is already proving to be a significant challenge for the 67-year-old Clinton, given the electorate's general sense of disaffection with established politicians — especially one seeking to succeed a president from her own party — the lack of a galvanizing national crisis to motivate voters, a spate of negative news stories about the Clintons, and her workmanlike approach at a time when the party's base is demanding bolder leadership.
"She is still the most prohibitive favorite for an open seat nomination I can recall," said David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's former message guru. "For all the navel-gazing, her numbers among Democrats remain quite high. But what is missing is a larger context for her candidacy that explains the positions she is taking in a coherent, and not just tactical, way. This is an important element of generating enthusiasm."
"She hasn't really laid that out her vision for the country in a comprehensive way, so basically she's allowed others, namely the press, to define her candidacy for her," said veteran pollster David Winston, who has advised House and Senate Republicans. "There's this pronounced feeling that we are just treading water as a country and people are just very frustrated."
Campaign manager Robby Mook contrasts Hillary Clinton, Obama on immigration
ANNIE KARNI
Clinton remains very popular with the Democratic base — she retains a commanding 40 to 50-point lead over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in recent surveys, and most of her supporters have told pollsters they aren't shopping for alternatives. But outside of Clinton's circle, Democratic operatives, donors and big labor leaders talk about her supporting her candidacy as a duty, rather than a cause. And in a race likely to be determined by mobilizing the base, rather than winning over independents, that's worrisome for the Clinton camp.
"There's not a lot of raw enthusiasm out there yet," said one Clinton fundraiser, echoing the sentiments of several other supporters we spoke to for this story. "I think that will change, especially when the campaign really gets going, but it's why she's been banging away on the 'I need to earn every vote' theme. She has to figure out a way to get people riled up."
To stoke the flames, Clinton is highlighting her battles for the powerless and downplaying her connections to power. When she launched her first presidential campaign in early 2007, the message was all about her ability to beat Republicans and her fitness to govern from "day one." This time, it's all about the fight – and her campaign released a new video on Friday showcasing, for the first time, her failed efforts at progressive reform, including the humbling 1993 collapse of her health care initiative.
The campaign also released a raft of metrics to show a movement gaining momentum – claiming nearly 12,000 volunteers enlisted so far, 11,000 attendees to Clinton events and 3,874 one-on-one meetings with potential supporters. But it's the message she delivers today, an exercise in political self-definition worked over for weeks, that's intended to sound the rallying cry. She plans to cover a lot of ground, aides say: Clinton will repeatedly lacerate Wall Street CEOs for their greed and call, in broad terms, for a new economic order that raises wages in the middle and at the bottom. And she'll tell all this through the lens of her family history, especially the story of her late mother Dorothy, who overcame poverty and abandonment to raise Clinton and her two brothers.
It's not like Clinton hasn't been able to inspire her followers in the past, especially when she emphasizes her gender. The last big address she delivered as a presidential candidate, her June 2008 "glass ceiling" concession speech, was arguably her best. "Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it, and the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time," she told a rapt audience at Washington's National Building Museum.
Clinton will hit the trail immediately after leaving Roosevelt Island, heading to Iowa and New Hampshire; starting in July, she intends to fill in the blanks of her policy proposals, delivering a series of speeches around the country. The goal, according to people close to the campaign, is to do just enough to keep progressives in the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders wing satisfied without alienating general election voters.
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That may well prove to be a successful strategy – but it's not exactly a formula for generating Obama '08-style excitement.
"If the question is, is she going to get plenty of people to vote for her such that she wins the Democratic primary, the answer is yes, there's sufficient enthusiasm," says former Clinton administration official Jonathan Cowan, now president of the moderate Third Way think tank.
"Is she going to generate the exact same feelings as the first person to become president of the U.S. who is African-American in a country that had a Civil War over slavery? No, but neither did Carter, Reagan, or even Bill Clinton."
During a POLITICO Playbook Cocktails discussion on Friday night, Clinton Campaign Manager Robby Mook bridled when Chief White House Correspondent Mike Allen asked if there was "an enthusiasm gap" between the 2008 campaign and Clinton's 2016 effort.
"Maybe in the reporters' lounge, that's the sense," Mook said to applause from Clinton backers in the room. "I have been literally been all over this country … in rooms jam packed with people who could not be more psyched to be part of this campaign. I don't think there's a gap. I think there's a tidal wave of enthusiasm."
Clinton, Mook added, has been plenty "bold" – and he pointed to her recent pledge to extend Obama's executive order limiting immigrant deportations and a plan to implement mandatory voter registration and extend early voting. But she's also exhibited some of the old caution – refusing to weigh in on a controversial Obama-backed trade vote that most liberals, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, oppose, and speaking only of the crisis in Iraq in the most general of terms.
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In the end, however, Clinton's prospects might rise or fall on her capacity to capitalize on her unique role in history as the first woman to seriously compete for the White House. And her supporters are likely to hammer home the more practical implications – it's possible the next president will have to replace two or even three members of the Supreme Court – an issue of the highest urgency for abortion-rights Democratic women. "It's absolutely one of the most important issues facing women in this country," says Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily's List and a top Clinton ally.
Still, women voters are not a monolithic group. Internal Democratic polling shows Clinton performing strongly with younger women voters, a group that prioritizes reproductive freedom and shares Clinton's liberal views on social issues like same-sex marriage. But older, married women — more conservative and likely to be laser-focused on family economic issues – have always posed more of a challenge for Democrats, and it's to them that Clinton is making her most direct pitch.
"The central question in this race is whether you're on the side of everyday Americans: whether you have the solutions to address the problems facing American families and the ability to deliver," is how Clinton will frame her larger economic argument, according to pre-speech campaign talking points obtained by POLITICO and first published by Business Insider.
So far, it's been hard to gauge enthusiasm for Clinton's candidacy from her first round of rigorously stage-managed appearances in battleground states, held before small, select audiences of handpicked supporters. The days of general-audience speeches are about to begin – and with them endless comparisons of attendee fervor at events hosted by Clinton, Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley.
The start-small strategy was an attempt to ease back into electoral politics after a seven-year absence – and to push back against the impression that her wealth and fame have rendered her incapable of sympathizing with the "everyday Americans" she's campaigning for. But the events have been a mixed bag. For reporters watching from the sidelines — who haven't been given fundraising numbers or verifiable accounts of the campaign's volunteer operations — there's little to do but crowd-count, and report the mixed-bag results. The turnout for her events has been solid, the reception enthusiastic but restrained — and there have been plenty of empty seats at recent campaign events in Texas and South Carolina.
Today's Clinton speech will be on a larger scale – but not too big, held in a modest patch of grass on the south side of the island, more easily filled than an arena venue.
Hillary Clinton endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 after a bruising primary battle. | AP Photo
Fairly or not, Clinton will always be judged by the standards of the 2008 Democratic primary, an historic campaign that elevated Barack Obama to political superstardom and created an expectation that winning candidates can fill football stadiums with 80,000 screaming fans. In fact, Obama himself couldn't repeat the trick; his 2012 reelection kick-off speech was held in a half-filled basketball arena on the campus of the Ohio State University in Columbus.
Even Axelrod, the keeper of the Obama flame, thinks the U.S. is in a "difficult period" for the kind of soaring rhetoric that worked in 2008. "Cynicism is quite high. 2008 was a bit of an outlier, 2012 more the norm," he said. "It's much more likely to be a grind-it-out election than a glide path."
But 2008 still looms large, and even Clinton's closest allies can't avoid making comparisons between her 2016 reboot and her participation in the most competitive and energizing primary in recent party history.
"One of the huge differences between then and now is that we are now sort of losing that sense of urgency we had back then," said a senior Democratic official closely allied to Clinton. "That's really what makes this election such a challenge for her … there's no Barack Obama, no John Edwards, no financial crisis.
"It's just not quite as exciting for anyone."
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Schriock is the president of Emily's List.