archived: 18 - 24 May, 2008         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  MAY 22, 2008 

Note: Dr. Jonas’ column today is unique – actually a private look at TPJ behind the scenes.  Dr. Jonas submitted his column for publication and requested that I respond to him with my thoughts.  I privately returned my thoughts (in red below) and Dr. Jonas immediately responded that his column should run with my comments. 

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“A WOULDA-SHOULDA-COULDA GAME PLAN FOR CLINTON” 

   Three weeks ago I ran a column on a “Game Plan for Obama.”  It assumed that he would win the Democratic nomination and offered some thoughts on how he might best run his campaign for the Presidency.  (Actually at the time he didn’t have the nomination sewed up and I noted that several of the ideas were applicable to both the primary campaign and the general election.)  As I write this on May 16, Sen. Obama does seem to have the nomination sewed up; that is unless the Clintons have been saving some bombshell that would make the “Rev. Wright controversy” they tried so unsuccessfully to use seem like it had been shot from a bee-bee gun.   

   I have not been an Obama supporter from the beginning of the primary campaign, but I must admit that I have been a Clinton opponent from the beginning.  I did not think that she could win the general election, given her extraordinarily high negatives (Actually, I think this fact may have prevented her obtaining the nomination.  The query is thus: if Hillary’s negatives had not been so high, would Rev. Wright have doomed Obama?), and I did not like her approach to governing which shared with George H.W. Bush an aversion to “the vision thing.”  (George W. Bush, by the way, has absolutely no aversion to “the vision thing.”  He has a vision alright, and he has been highly successful in implementing it [see my TPJ columns “The Most Successful American President, Parts 1, 2, and 3, TPJ nos. 155-57, in the list below].  He just never bothered to share his true vision with the American people at large and his Democratic challengers just never happened to reveal it for him.)  Sen. Edwards was my man until he dropped out.  Then I began looking at Sen. Obama more closely, particularly attracted by the fact that he is very much into “the vision thing” and happens to have one for the future of our nation that I like very much. 

   But with all of her negatives in the general population and her lack of vision, could Sen. Clinton have won the nomination anyway?  I think that she could have.  In this column I share with you some thoughts about how she might have gone about doing that.  It would have required an entirely different approach to the task of winning the nomination, in both substance and process, from the beginning. (Agreed, she lacked an effective strategy as to either – telling for a woman that we thought was at the top of the political strategist list)  To help get a handle on the process first, let’s look briefly at how the last two Democratic Presidential candidates went about trying to get elected.   

   Al Gore clearly ran not to lose.  He and his people thought that George Bush would be pushover and that even with all the WJ Clinton negatives (with which he tried as hard as he could to disassociate himself) the Clinton positives would play for him.  He did manage to win of course, just not by enough to avoid having the election stolen from him by the firm of Baker, Rove, et al.  And even in the Florida, while the Georgites, actually playing with the weaker hand (they knew that if there were a state-wide recount, they would lose), played to win, Gore played not to lose.  And he lost. 

   John Kerry, apparently learning from the Gore experience, played to win.  His problem was that neither he nor his people, headed by perennial campaign-loser Bob Shrum, knew how to do that.  The non-response to the “Swift Boat” attack was only the most prominent of his campaign fiascoes.  He never attacked Bush on his true record, he never countered other outrageous personal attacks such as Bush saying in a New York Times Magazine interview that appeared about a month before the election “I’m going to step on his neck,” he never engaged in the innocent question “what is that square box under the President’s jacket” as it had appeared so prominently during one of the Debates, he never used the President’s “war record” against him and so one and so forth.  Kerry most likely won anyway, but even though he had $15 million in campaign funds left over and had said that he would use it for legal challenges if indicated, he never engaged in Ohio even though it was clear that the Republican Secretary of State, who just happened to be Bush’s Ohio campaign chairman, had rigged the election there. (As to Ohio, I think you are wrong; but allow that you could be right.   But note, since Dems have been in power in Ohio and have the power to determine the issue we’ve heard nothing; a telling silence I think.) 

   Hillary Clinton has continued this pattern, altered slightly. She ran to win, but made the huge mistake of thinking that she already had. (Yep! I would have added here that she also misperceived the mood of the American people.  Americans do want change – reflected by the historic “wrong track” polling results – but she allowed herself to be painted as a part of the political establishment that is part of the problem rather than an agent for change that Americans want.  This was perhaps the biggest “blunder” of her campaign.)  In a sports analogy, she and her campaign thought that they simply had “throw their jerseys out on the floor” and the game was theirs.  Thus for her, like the 2007 season Super Bowl was for the New England Patriots, the contest became what in sports lingo is called the “trap game.”  You’re just so sure that you are going to win that by the time you start playing to win, you’ve lost.  And so, here are some thoughts on how Hillary could have won, even given her negatives. 

1.       Never assume that you have the game in hand.  Obama isn’t doing so, even as I write. (Ok.)(You also miss a larger political reality here.  AA voters were a large part of Clinton’s base.  Bill Clinton constructed victory without a plurality of W votes; but enough W votes coupled with AA support to win.  When BO started locking up AA’s, he was effectively cutting HC from her base and an easy victory.  BO also garnered W Northern and Collegiate intellectuals who have never liked the Clinton’s and who found a more “pure” progressive in BO.  That has been BO’s winning coalition.) 
 

2.       Hire the right team, with no potential conflicts of interest, that will provide full-time leadership.  Mark Penn, for some odd reason her numero uno, was negative on both counts. (Ok, as far as it goes.  However, the larger issue is that if you have to run a campaign to explain a vision of change, Penn, et al is not the right man for the job.  Refer back to Kerry’s campaign for example.) 
 

3.       Spend some time figuring why you really want to be President.  Ego? Power?  Get something done?  For your party?  For your primary funders?  For the majority of the people?  For your country?  Clinton didn’t really seem to know, likely the major reason why the focus of her campaign has been all over the place, even at times from day-to-day. (You’re onto the central issue, but more clarity is needed. Hillary does represent change, so what examples would you give? How should she have packaged them – what was the overarching “vision” that would have convinced Americans.)  
 

4.       Establish your principles of governance and governing first.  Use focus groups to figure out how to present them.  Don’t use focus groups to establish your principles.  The first is leadership.  The second (which the Clintons have done forever) is “followship.” (Really?  I think you’re correct as to the first sentence to the extent that one never got an overarching theme to her candidacy – but was it because she followed?  Don’t think so.) 
 

5.       Learn the lessons of the Dean Campaign.  Vast sums of money can be raised on the web.  But financing is only the beginning.  Money without organization, which is what Dean had, gets you what Dean got: nothing.  Joe Trippi, his Campaign Manager, invented modern web fundraising.  He also got to Iowa there thousands of “Deaniacs.”  But they largely sat on their hands because there was no plan for organizing them.  If you rely mainly on large donors, like Clinton did, and you run into trouble, your money will eventually run out, like Clinton’s has. (Correct …. Horrid ground game.  But, isn’t that what you get with the likes of Penn et al?) 

6.       Specific campaign policy mistakes: 

a.       The refusal to totally disavow the War-on-Iraq vote, without any “if I had known then what I know now” equivocation, probably doomed the campaign from the beginning. (Really?  It certainly hurt her with the intellectual intelligista, and that helped provide critical support for Obama; but that is about it!  As for average Americans the anti-war movement has been a dismal failure.  Anybody on the streets?  Any civil disobedience afoot?)  

 

b.      The drivers’ licenses for undocumented aliens thing, the first sign of a chink in the Clinton armor.  It would have been difficult to think the following answer up on the spot, but they could have had in hand by the next day: “You know what?  I did take two contradictory positions.  That shows just how complicated this issue is and how the simplicity of Cong. Hunter, echoed by so many Republicans, simply will not work.” (I agree.) 
 

c.       Rev. Wright.  As for Clinton, how much better she would have been served had she, when the Rev. Wright thing broke, said words to the effect of: "This issue has no place in the campaign.  One's religion and religious views, and the views of one's pastor for which one is hardly responsible, have no place in the campaign.  That is they have no place as long as one is not trying to impose them on others, as the Republican Party tries to do regularly on such issues as abortion and homosexual rights.  The Rev. Wright has not endorsed Sen. Obama. (Factually incorrect.  The problem with Rev. Wright for BO was NOT that he damned America – free country; you can damn America all you want.  Problem was that BO had him on his national campaign staff.  So, if Hillary had to be careful about aides who have “conflicts of interest,” BO, who had to know Rev. Wright’s views, exercised terrible judgment in associating him with the campaign in any regard.)  These attacks are out-of-bounds, and some would consider them racist in nature.  Now, when it comes to ministers who step into the political arena, like Sen. McCain's Rev. Hagee, that's another story."  (You’ll have to explain the difference to me and millions of other Americans.  I don’t see any real differences.)  When the obits and then the history of her miserable campaign are written this monstrous mistake (in several senses) will be featured, I'm sure. 
 

d.      Prof. Ayres.  A similar approach:  politicians who engage in guilt-by-association just take us back to one of the tawdriest eras of American history.   (As for the “Kindergarten” gambit, that one should have been left in the sandbox to begin with.) (Well, I am not as strong on this one as you are.  Most American children are taught by their grandmothers that “if you lay down with dogs you get fleas.”  I think who you surround yourself with is important.  Haven’t we been making that point about Bush and PNAC?   Are we being hypocritical here?) 
 

e.       When facing a candidate who assumes that the electorate is intelligent, you have to do it too: no “gas tax gambit.” (You would really list this as one of the biggies?) 
 

f.        Recognize right up front that what the nation needs, and wants, most is change.  Use your experience to fortify you position that you are thus best situated to produce it, not to put it up against a candidate running as a change-maker first and foremost and make fun of him simply as a good speech maker. (Here it is, the “rub” of the matter I think.)   
 

g.      Attack the Limbaugh/Republican Operation Chaos.  Don’t accept its supposed benefits because your candidacy will always be suspect, even if OC were to turn out to not have been a factor. 
 

h.       Right from the git-go, think of Obama as your running mate. (Yep!)   

   But Clinton didn’t do any of the above.  She will go down in history just as another brilliant but politically flawed “shoulda-coulda-woulda,” in the mold of Senator Douglas and Gov. Seward from the Civil War Era.(Maybe, maybe not!)  Let’s just hope that Obama will prove to be the Lincoln from that time, without the Civil War, of course. (From your lips to God’s ear!)  

(This was fun.  But, let’s look at some realities for BO as our nomine – serious ones!  Consider this as a gratuitous expansion of your original question.)  

1.        He has cobbled together AA’s and the intellectual elite and some urban W’s into a winning coalition.  Excellent construction and it worked.  But, Hillary has exposed his weaknesses – BO has little appeal to “lunch bucket” Democrats and especially Independents.  McCain will “move to the center” to capture these voters.  If he does, BO will go down in history as a McGovern rather than Kennedy. 

In the Dem Primary, about one third of all voters describe themselves as “liberal.”  In some primaries that figure has reached 40%+.  In the general election, the percent of self-identified liberals will fall to 19% on a good day.  

2.       Quick.  Name 3, 5, 10 of BO’s economic policies.  Can’t do it?  I can’t.  No one else I know can do it.  The point being ….. Well, he attacks NAFTA, CAFTA, etc., but the reality is that we have already passed that bridge.  There is no walking back from globalization; the question now is how do we survive and thrive in the new reality. I was APPALLED that while he was attacking NAFTA his advisors were calling the Canadians to reassure them that it was just campaign rhetoric.  Vision?  Leadership? Honesty?  Looks like a standard, RANK, political ploy to me. 

3.       BO is talking about transcending Parties?  Say what?  What does that really mean?  Can you tell me?  Are he and Republicans going to sit down and sing Kumbaya at the policy table?  I question his judgment.  

4.       Vision vs. reality.  BO was in North Carolina talking about making NC a battleground State in the General Election.  NC Democrats would eat sand to see that happen.  Well, the primary is over and BO campaign closed their campaign headquarters.  Will they be back?  Vision?  Honesty?  Moral character? Politically, the decision to leave NC may or may not be smart.  But, is this how BO delivers on his promises?  Telling I think. 

5.       In NC, several polls are showing that 1 in 4 DEMOCRATS will be voting for McCain.  Repeat, 1 in 4.  While Obama campaigned here, he never left the big cities.  In fact, five cities gave him his winning margins.  But, did he travel to rural NC.  Did he talk with W rural poor people?  NOT ONCE!   Smart politically in the short term, but it will not help him win NC or a lot of other States.  

6.       I truly believe who one associates with is a legitimate issue.  We held Bush to account for his associations; and not to do so with BO is hypocritical.  BO’s judgment on Rev. Wright was horrid, simply horrid. But, MORE IMPORTANTLY, the advisors around BO do not understand American cultural values. I have written you before that in NC they were playing ads of two yuppies discussing political issues in a Starbucks.  Even BO supporters were scratching their heads.  If he does not understand who he is talking to, he will never capture the Americans he needs to win.  

7.       AND, he walked away from W Virginia.  Again, smart politically, but politics as usual is not what he promised.  And, if he is unwilling to engage the less educated, W, culturally conservative citizens of W Virginia, what does this say about his ability to form a winning coalition in November?  Telling I think.  Doc, he walked away and the political left has given him a pass on it.  BAD! What does that say to people about his “new politics?”   

The political left is going to get its candidate.  It will either be a transitional election of historic proportions or it may look more like McGovern “gone wild.”  I hope and will ardently work for the former; I fear the latter.

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