Buck up, GOP: your most valuable campaign asset is returning to boost your chances in the 2018 midterms. That’s right, Her Rodham Highness is planning to hit the hustings on behalf of selected Democrats. Why would Hillary Clinton return to campaigning in 2018 when the Democrats need to seize lots of seats from red and purple areas to have a chance at retaking the House and she has a 36 percent approval rating (according to Gallup, last November)? Well, Clinton and her friends and associates (hi, Peter Daou!) are under the impression she still has lots of ”star power.” I’d say she’s more like a star that collapsed in on itself and is now dangerous to approach. But the WaPo’s Robert Costa reports: “Her emerging 2018 strategy, according to more than a dozen friends and advisers familiar with her plans, is to leverage the star power she retains in some Democratic circles on behalf of select candidates while remaining sufficiently below the radar to avoid becoming a useful target for Republicans seeking to rile up their base.”
In keeping with her nutty decision to appear on the Grammys to ineffectually ridicule the man who ended her presidential dreams on Election Night 2016, Clinton can’t stop being entranced by the songs being sung by her chorus of sycophants. What’s hilarious is that she thinks a stealth strategy of making herself visible to her friends but invisible to her enemies is going to work. “She’s not going to be up front,” said Jaime Harrison, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told Costa. Clinton plans to help turn out key blocs such as blacks and Latinos, Harrison says. Costa goes on to say ”there is an emphasis on Clinton moving cautiously rather than making headlines with a flurry of interviews and endorsements” like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
Remember who else tried campaigning in stealth mode? Barack Obama, who in the 2014 midterm campaigns went on Al Sharpton’s radio show two weeks before the election to say, of Democrats who were frantically trying to distance themselves from him, ”The bottom line is, though, these are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress.” It turned out that non-Sharpton fans heard about the remark also. Every time Hillary Cllinton shows up at a campaign event she will be inviting the Republican party to remind Americans that Democrats want people like her to be in charge. This isn’t star power. This is more like the heel guest shot of GOP consultants’ dream.