Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, respectively a Democratic strategist who used to work for Hillary Clinton and a Democratic politician, tell us that “Hillary 4.0” will run and imply that she will win the Democratic nomination in 2020. Parts of their analysis seem to me spot-on, especially the notion that Clinton moved too far left on social and cultural issues in the run-up to 2016. (Whether she gets that point, notwithstanding the authors’ claims that she has learned from her defeat, is not at all clear.)
What Penn and Stein never grapple with are the possibilities a) that someone running as the fourth version of herself might thereby be showing that she is untrustworthy and lacks a core and b) that voters might not be willing to grant her another ideological makeover. These seem like glaring oversights given that their whole case is structured by the “4.0” idea.