Rich, as there is a long tradition of shameless self-promotion and “I-told-you-so-ing” here in the Corner, I will not be the first to break with that tradition. You write: “It’s been a trope to say that Hillary is getting pushed to the Left by Elizabeth Warren and others, in part to foreclose any chance of another Obama-like primary challenge.”
True enough, but I’ve never really thought that trope was correct. For instance, immediately after she announced, I wrote a column titled “Hillary Shouldn’t Count On the Obama Coalition to Carry Her to the White House” in which I argued that she shouldn’t count on the Obama coalition to carry her to the White House.
It was obvious — to me at least — that her campaign video signaled this strategy from the beginning. I wrote:
The people profiled are a visual checklist of Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” (Ron Brownstein’s phrase): young people, minorities, gays, college-educated whites, single working women, etc. As with pretty much everything Clinton does, that was carefully planned.
What hadn’t really occurred to me until more recently was that this is Hillary’s only hope. As I wrote in the G-File a couple weeks ago:
This is an important political point because the Clinton strategists and spinners are invested in a theory that electing a woman will be transformative. It will be like that scene in Excalibur where King Arthur, rejuvenated by the Holy Grail, revives the brown and wasted crops and forests simply by riding by. We already had one experiment in this kind of magical thinking. It worked for Barack Obama. I don’t think it will work for Hillary. Obama was new and fresh. Hillary . . . isn’t.
I think this offers insight into why Hillary is betting it all on reviving the Obama coalition. I’ve written many times that I don’t think she can succeed. But maybe I’m wrong …. And, more to the point, I’ve come to realize it’s the only strategy open to her. She can’t run to win moderates, independents, and swing voters (save for a subset of women who will vote strictly on identity-politics lines), because these voters can’t be Jedi-mind-tricked into ignoring all of her baggage. Only the hyper-partisan, the extremely uninformed, the incurably gullible, and, of course, the heavily bribed can get really excited about Hillary Clinton.
The Martin and Haberman piece seems to confirm my suspicions (my column on NRO tomrrow is about that piece, by the way). Where I think the Clinton team overstates things (and where Martin and Haberman are a bit too credulous of her team) is the degree to which the Democrats think they are merely responding to changes on the ground. It may be true that the only way for Clinton to win is to try to whip up a frenzy in the Democratic base. But that may have less to do with the polarized electorate and more to do with the fact that Hillary is polarizing. Just because she can’t win moderates, independents, and other swing voters doesn’t necessarily mean no Democrat could. When you’ve got bad dog food to sell, your marketing options are limited. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not a market for better dog food out there.
One last point. There’s also a possible confirmation bias problem at work. Clinton is top-heavy with Obama strategists. They’re pretty self-congratulatory about their willingness to throw off the electoral strategies of the past. That’s fine, except for the fact that the strategies they’re going with are the only ones they know. Just because this energize-the-base approach worked for Obama in 2012 (Note: Obama didn’t run a pure base election in 2008) doesn’t mean they will work for a generic Democrat, never mind a tarnished brand like Hillary Clinton.