How to beat Hillary Clinton

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton greet a rally in Florida during the 2008 Presidential race.

This week marks an important anniversary in the political lives of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton was dominating the young upstart from Illinois in the Democratic primaries. After a burst of excitement when Obama announced his candidacy, in February, 2007, his campaign flagged over the summer. He was down in the polls, his donors were complaining, and, hard as it is to believe now, he was even losing to Clinton among African-Americans.

“A lot of our supporters nationally were very concerned that we weren’t moving in the national polls,” Larry Grisolano, one of Obama’s top campaign strategists, told me.

Dan Pfeiffer, then the campaign’s deputy communications director, told me, “It’s crazy to think now, but the big narrative was whether Obama was tough enough to take on Clinton and whether he was black enough to win the African-American vote. That’s an actual debate we had in America. You could see the political world placing its bets on Hillary.”

“We were trailing in national polls by a wide margin, the pundits were pouncing, and donors were panicking,” David Axelrod, who was Obama’s top strategist and later became a senior White House adviser, told me.

How did the Obama team turn it around? 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.

The kill-Hillary strategy began with an October memo that was written by several top Obama officials, including Axelrod, Grisolano, Pfeiffer, the campaign manager David Plouffe, and Joel Benenson, Obama’s pollster. “Joel Benenson was a key contributor to how we stack up against her message-wise,” Grisolano said.

I’ve previously reported on aspects of the memo, but the entire document is being published here for the first time. It offers a fascinating glimpse into campaign strategy, and specifically into the strategy used to defeat Hillary Clinton, who was then, as now, the Democratic frontrunner.

The memo was used to set up a crucial meeting to plot Obama’s fall strategy, which included a debate in Philadelphia and the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, traditionally one of the most important events in the run-up to the caucuses. Obama and his aides met in a Chicago office building on October 11, 2007. “The memo was written for a big Come-to-Jesus meeting, at which Obama wanted us to review the strategy and lay out our plans,” Axelrod said, adding that Obama “wanted to talk brass tacks about where we were going” and “we had a rigorous discussion around the points in the memo.”

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:

• Our construct is much broader and tracks with Americans’ deep discontent with Washington, specifically:
• Its political gamesmanship, where politicians score points by saying what others want to hear, rather than what they need to hear;
• Its divisiveness, which pits Americans against each other and blocks the consensus we need to get things done;
• Its submission to powerful interests that shut out the voices of average Americans.
The only way for Obama to win this argument about change was for him to raise the character issue, which he had tiptoed around until that point in the campaign. Benenson’s polling showed that voters wanted a President “who can unite the country and restore our sense of common purpose,” “stand up to lobbyists,” and “who doesn’t just tell people what they want to hear.” The strategists, addressing Obama, wrote that these qualities “are the ones on which YOU scores high and Hillary, low.” They concluded, “Barack Obama is change. She is not.”

The next section was headlined, “The Fault Line: Hillary’s the Problem, Not the Answer,” and the strategists laid out the case against Clinton in stark terms, explaining that 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.
The memo went on to criticize Clinton as “a prescription for more of the same, meaning that our shared goals will once again be frustrated by Washington’s failed politics,” and it included a grid—“The Basic Messaging Framework”—to highlight the differences that Obama needed to emphasize:

Attacking Clinton as “driven by politics, not conviction” and arguing that she “puts preserving political power ahead of reliable principles or progress for the American people” was a tricky for Obama. After all, if he represented a new way of doing politics, he couldn’t sound like a traditional politician on the attack.

“Frequently, in campaigns, when we say ‘contrast,’ it’s a euphemism for a frontal attack,” Grisolano explained. “You can see in the memo, and this is important about the constraints that the message put on us, because if you are the unity guy you can’t come out with a crowbar against your opponent. We had to show we were different, but do it in a way that wasn’t as direct as most campaigns do.”

In the memo, Obama was counselled to attack Clinton subtly but not “so subtly or obtusely that the press doesn’t write about them and the voters don’t understand that we’re talking about HRC.” Obama agreed with the strategy. “One thing I recall was that he was willing to draw contrasts with Hillary but was very intent on doing it in ways with which he felt comfortable,” Axelrod told me.

Another former senior Obama adviser argued that the same vulnerabilities that the Obama team seized upon still exist and are just waiting to be exploited by Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley or her other opponents. “Her greatest vulnerability in this primary is on shifting positions,” the former senior adviser said, adding that her recent announcement to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she previously supported, was a mistake. “Her decision on T.P.P. is a fairly significant error. She is going to get attacked either way, so she might as well get attacked while having a sincere position.”

The adviser added that inside the Administration Clinton was not a critic of the deal: “I went to a lot of T.P.P. meetings and she was in all of them.”

Could Obama’s 2007 strategy work in 2015? The Obama strategists I talked to were skeptical. “The conventional wisdom is that Hillary is in deep trouble and that Biden is ready to ride to the rescue of the Party,” Axelrod said. “I just don’t see it. I said a month ago that I thought her stock was greatly undervalued, and I would buy it now. I still feel that way.”

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.