Hillary Clinton Should Play to Her Strengths
Though Hillary Clinton stumbled on the issue of Wall Street funding, her town-hall and debate performances in New Hampshire this week showed her humanity and sense of humor. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY ADREES LATIF / REUTERS
Twice in two nights now, the voters of New Hampshire (and television viewers across the nation) have had a chance to see Hillary Clinton answering questions at length. At times, she has looked like the President-in-waiting that she was supposed by many to be: smart, knowledgeable, persuasive. At other times, particularly when, during Thursday’s MSNBC debate, she accused Bernie Sanders of orchestrating a smear campaign against her, Clinton has appeared a bit rattled.
Perhaps it was the closeness of the result earlier this week in Iowa that prompted Clinton to go on the attack; perhaps it was the polls in New Hampshire showing Sanders leading by a large margin. Perhaps she simply couldn’t hide her irritation after Sanders mentioned that a super PAC supporting her campaign raised fifteen million dollars from Wall Street in the fourth quarter of last year. In any case, the ensuing exchange, which my colleague Amy Davidson covered at length, presented Sanders with a perfect opportunity to restate the central argument of his campaign: big money is corrupting the political process and undermining American democracy.
Clinton needs to address this critique—or, more accurately, to feature a version of it more prominently in her own campaign. What she doesn’t need, surely, is a lengthy debate about what, if anything, her Wall Street donors received in return for their money: that would be fighting on Sanders’s ground. (After the heated exchange, the Sanders campaign e-mailed reporters to point out that Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticized Clinton for changing her position, when she was in the Senate, on a bankruptcy bill, elements of which were vehemently opposed by the financial industry.)
Although it might sound a bit counterintuitive, Clinton needs to return to the strategy that allowed her to eke out a narrow victory in Iowa. It will serve her well as the primary moves on to larger, more-populous states with more nonwhite voters. This strategy, rather than trying to meet Sanders head-on, focusses on acknowledging his good intentions and questioning whether he can deliver on his promises. It involves having Clinton emphasize her own program, which is carefully targeted at middle-class voters, and her experience in foreign policy, as well as her support for civil rights. Above all, it means appealing to Democratic voters—moderates and liberals—who are terrified of the prospect of the Republicans retaking the White House and controlling all three branches of government.
On Wednesday night, at a town-hall meeting, in Derry, which was moderated by Anderson Cooper and shown on CNN, Clinton did exactly what she needed to do. As usual, she displayed an effortless command of the issues. On this occasion, though, she also displayed a sense of humor and a humanity that sometimes doesn’t come through.
When Cooper told Clinton that he wanted to ask her a few personal questions so that the voters could get to know her, she quipped, “You don’t think they know everything?” When a rabbi asked her about how she balanced the need to cultivate the kind of ego that someone must have to be the leader of the free world with the need to preserve some humility, she said, “This is hard for me. You know, I never thought I’d be standing on a stage here asking people to vote for me for President. I always wanted to be of service. I met my husband, who was such a natural, knew exactly what he wanted to do…. I never thought I would do this.” It was a line that Clinton has used before in interviews, but it seemed genuine. If you were married to the most gifted American politician of the modern era, and had watched him move from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House, you, too, might harbor some doubts about your own political talents.
The most touching moment of the evening came when a frail-looking man named Jim Kinhan stood up and said, “I’m walking with colon cancer, with the word ‘terminal’ very much in my vocabulary, comfortably and spiritually.” Kinhan asked Clinton how she would help sick people and their caregivers approach “their end of life with dignity.” Clinton smiled at Kinhan, then thanked him for being there and for posing a question she hadn’t been asked about before. Then she thought out loud. She pointed out that some states are moving toward legalizing euthanasia; she said that this was a conversation the country needed to have, about an issue that people needed to think through from their own ethical or religious viewpoints. “So here’s how I think about it,” she said, then went on:
We are, on the good side, having many people live longer, but often, then, with very serious illnesses that they can be sustained on but, at some point, don’t want to continue with the challenges that poses. So I don’t have any easy or glib answer for you. I think I would want to really immerse myself in the ethical writings, the health writings, the scientific writings, the religious writings. I know some other countries, the Netherlands and others, have a quite open approach. I’d like to know what their experience has been.
That was Clinton at her best: concerned, reasonable, open-minded, empirical.
To be sure, she wasn’t flawless during the rest of the event. When Cooper asked her about the six hundred and seventy five thousand dollars that she had received in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, she said, “That’s what they offered.” But apart from that slipup, Clinton was impressive. Asked by Julie Carnigan, a mother of five daughters who are all supporting Sanders, what she could do to win them over, Clinton talked about her record, cited a Concord Monitor newspaper article that queried whether Sanders’s aims could be achieved, and then gracefully alluded to her gender, which, so far, doesn’t appear to have helped her very much with female millennials. “The final thing I would say is, it is still the case that there are challenges and obstacles to young women’s ambitions,” Clinton said. “And I’m going to try to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I hope it splinters completely, and I hope for your daughters it opens doors that might not be open right now, regardless of whether any of them ever do anything politically. But in their lives, their profession, how they’re treated. I hope it does give them more of a sense of empowerment.”
Clinton was also very effective at placing the New Hampshire vote in a larger political context. Early on, Cooper, falling back on an old journalistic trope, asked her if she does better when she is fighting from behind. Clinton replied, “To me, obviously, Tuesday is a really big deal with the primary. But the goal has to be to prevent the Republicans from getting back into the White House and undoing all the progress that has been made under President Obama.” An audience member, Sean Burke, asked Clinton how, if elected, she would defend herself against right-wing attacks. “I’ve been through this for so many years, Sean,” she said. “My understanding of the political tactics that the other side uses is pretty well versed. They play to keep. They play to destroy. They are constantly doing whatever they can to win.” After bringing up a Republican SUPER PAC that is now attacking her, Clinton went on. “So I know I have to keep defending against them. But I’m the one who has the experience to do that,” she said.
“Do you still believe there’s a vast right-wing conspiracy?” Cooper asked.
“Yes. It’s gotten even better funded. You know they brought in some new multibillionaires to pump the money in,” she replied, before correcting herself. “At this point, it’s probably not correct to say it’s a conspiracy, because it’s out in the open,” she said. “They’re shopping among the Republican candidates to figure out who among them will most likely do their bidding. So just know what we’re up against, because it’s real, and we’re going to beat it. But it’s going to take everybody working together.”
That is the heart of the Clinton message: experience, durability, practicality, and unity. These qualities may not set the pulse racing or fill basketball stadiums. But, as Clinton struggles to close the gap with Sanders in New Hampshire, they, together with the prospect of electing the first female President, still represent her best chance of winning the nomination, and the Presidency.
