For all her struggles with poll numbers and the email investigation this year, Hillary Rodham Clinton has done one thing really well: dissuade mainstream opponents by dominating the invisible primary, the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the nomination.
Where Bernie and Hillary Really Disagree
Chris Hayes makes in his excellent book, Twilight of the Elites, between “institutionalists,” who want to make existing institutions function better and “insurrectionists,” who want to tear them down and start again.
Sanders is an insurrectionist. That’s why, asked about following the most transformational liberal president in a half-century, he didn’t say that America is moving in the right direction but has further to go. He said America needs a “political revolution.” He also said that, “America’s campaign finance system is corrupt.”
Hillary never talks that way. She acknowledges problems but she rarely indicts America’s core economic and political institutions. Consider the two candidates’ answers on financial regulation. Sanders said that, “Wall Street, where fraud is a business model, helped to destroy this economy and the lives of millions of people.” Thus, “we have got to break up” the banks. Hillary, by contrast, said that “Dodd-Frank was a good start, and I think that we have to implement it … We have to save the Consumer Financial Protection board.” Sanders, in other words, attacked the system; Hillary explained how it could be improved.
.. Progressives don’t just love him because his policy proposals are more left wing than Hillary’s. They love the fact that he calls America’s political and economic system corrupt, and that he refuses to play by that corrupt system’s rules: for instance, by raising money via a super PAC. That’s why being a “socialist” doesn’t hurt Sanders among many liberals. For many, “socialism” is just another way of saying you want to tear down the existing order and build something better in its place.
How to Beat Hillary Clinton (by Barak Obama’s staff)
The conventional wisdom is that he inspired voters with an uplifting message and out-organized Clinton in Iowa and elsewhere. And while it’s true that Obama had a superior organization and an optimistic message, the real beginning of the end for Hillary Clinton was when Obama attacked her greatest vulnerability: her character.
.. Obama’s strategists argued that the “key premise” of the campaign was that 2008 would be a change election, and that while Hillary was trying to “define this as change from George Bush,” Obama had a broader definition, one that emphasized her weaknesses:
.. everything in Obama’s campaign, including his slogan—“Change you can believe in”—was meant to provide a contrast with Hillary, not on policy, but on character:
“Change you can believe in” was intended to frame the argument along the character fault line, and this is where we can and must win this fight. We cannot let Clinton especially blur the lines on who is the genuine agent of change in this election.• The reason Clinton can’t be trusted or believed when it comes to change is that she represents, to a great degree, the three sources of discontent formulated in our premise.
• She’s driven by political calculation not conviction, regularly backing away and shifting positions on issues ranging from war, to Social Security, to trade, to reform.
• She embodies trench warfare vs. Republicans, and is consumed with beating them rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done.
• She prides herself on working the system, not changing it—rebuffing reforms on everything from lobbyist donations to budget earmarks... Hillary learned a lot of lessons from the 2007-2008 battle with Obama. In fact, one of the first decisions she made this time around was to hire Joel Benenson, the pollster who helped write the memo on how to beat her.
Hillary’s Opportunish
All presidential candidates face a core problem. To win their party’s nomination in an age of growing polarization they have to adopt base-pleasing, pseudo-extreme policy positions. But to win a general election and actually govern they have to adopt semi-centrist majority positions.
How can one person do both?
Nobody had figured this out until, brilliantly, Hillary Clinton. She is campaigning on a series of positions that she transparently does not believe in. She’ll say what she needs to say now to become Bernie Sanders in a pantsuit (wait, Bernie Sanders already wears a pantsuit!). Then, nomination in hand and White House won, she will, it appears, transparently flip back and embrace whatever other positions she doesn’t believe in that will help her succeed in her new role.
.. Her most impressive elision concerns trade, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. When she announced her opposition to Judy Woodruff on the “PBS NewsHour” she was performing a flip-flop of the sort that leaves gymnasts gaping and applauding. As CNN pointed out, she’s praised the deal 45 separate times, at one point calling it “the gold standard in trade agreements.”
.. This deftness could, if used wisely, help Clinton placate the left in order to get the nomination and then placate the powerful in order, as president, to pass legislation. By contrast, if a conviction politician like Sanders or Ben Carson got elected, he wouldn’t be able to get 35 votes for anything he proposed.
.. As the old wisdom goes, the problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.
.. If Clinton’s flip-flop ends up sinking the deal, she will have helped sentence millions of people to further poverty and destabilized the world’s most dynamic region.