A year ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, the nation’s imagination is not focused on whether the Democrats will continue to hold the Senate or if the House Republicans have gambled away their “bulletproof” control of the House. The nation is focused on a 65-year-old retiree from Westchester County, N.Y. and what her future plans may be.
Even though the former secretary of state has not declared her intentions to run for the presidency, recent polling shows the Democratic nomination to be Hillary Clinton’s if she wants it, overwhelmingly. A Sept. 16 CNN/ORC poll shows the 2008 Democratic Primaries’ runner-up has 65 percent of the support of all Democrats and democratic-leaning independents surveyed. No other Democrat came close: Vice-President Joe Biden — who has been speculating publicly about his intention to run — was favored by only 10 percent of left-leaning respondents. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) received seven percent. Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) came in at six percent and Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-Md.) closed the field with two percent.
Clinton’s appeal is even more clear-cut than this. According to 270 To Win — which has compiled all polling concerning hypothetical matchups between possible 2016 candidates — Clinton won every match-up conducted by every polling company by at least one percentage point. Monmouth University, for example, scored Clinton versus Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) 43 percent to 39 percent, Clinton versus former Gov. John Ellis “Jeb” Bush (R-Fl.) 47 percent to 37 percent, Clinton versus Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) 47 percent to 36 percent and Clinton versus Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) 48 percent to 32 percent.
With the 2016 Electoral College map looking increasingly favorable to the Democrats retaining the White House due to a growing Latino voting base, solidified support of the Democrats among African-Americans and positive demographic shifts to blue and blue-leaning states, the 2016 Democratic nominee race will be of heavy significance.
Ghosts of campaign past
But for those that remember the 2008 race, the situation may be ringing a familiar tune. During that race, Clinton was the overwhelming front-runner, too. During the 2004 Democratic National Convention, an obscure Illinois state senator named Barack Obama took the stage and electrified the crowd. Two years after that, he became the junior U.S. senator from Illinois. A year and a half after this — after a prolonged, personal and politically bloody campaign — the freshman from Illinois defeated a woman who many assumed was a sure bet to be president for the Democratic nomination.
Five years later, Clinton is still haunted by the ghost of her failed ambition. Federal investigators are currently probing Clinton’s 2008 campaign in an attempt to expand their corruption case against Jeffrey Thompson, a D.C. businessman who allegedly funded a secret get-out-the-vote scheme in at least four states with more than $600,000 in personal money. An “off-the-books” campaign activity could be construed as a violation of campaign finance rules, although charges against Clinton or her campaign team are unlikely, as the five-year statute of limitations has expired.
This occurred during the buildup to Super Tuesday, when the Clinton campaign had to compete against an accelerating Obama campaign in multiple states simultaneously, at a time when her war chest was running empty. The Clinton team was approached by Troy White, a New York marketing executive, who offered to set up “street teams” to assist in building up support. The Clinton campaign’s national political director, Guy Cecil, rejected the offer. However, Minyon Moore, a senior Clinton advisor, accepted White’s offer to help under a covert operation separate from the campaign. Thompson financed White’s actions.
While neither Moore nor Clinton are being accused of wrongdoing, this episode reflects the biggest problem with a Clinton run — a systematic lack of operational control. The 2008 campaign showed an operation that had no clear leadership, where team members were free to act on their own accord, where directives from the top didn’t always stick and where operatives were at liberty to freelance and second-guess.
“They had a lot of wildcatting going on,” said a veteran of past Democratic presidential campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the Washington Post. “If that happens in ’16, it doesn’t augur well.”
In August, the New York Times covered the growing problems with the management of the Clinton Foundation. “For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest,” the Times wrote. “It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.” Many have perceived this as weakness — as an inability to lead at the expense of personal ambition.
“She’s polished. She has a lot of experience. She has been under fire ever since her husband humiliated her again and again in the 1990s. I mean gee, First Lady, Secretary of State — you can’t question the resume. She’s been a senator. She’s done all of that,” Paul Kengor, a political commentator and professor of political science at Grove City College, said to the Daily Caller.
“On the other hand, among the weaknesses … I’ve talked to so many people who have met her and Bill. They all like Bill. None of them like Hillary,” Kengor continued. “Bill comes in to a room, kinda lights up the room, he’s a good old boy and everybody likes being around him. Hillary comes in and you just feel like this cold wind when she comes in. She does have a likeability problem that her husband didn’t have. She doesn’t have the charisma of an Obama, of a Reagan.”
This, of course, is debatable. Clinton, in her 23 years of service in Washington — as first lady to Bill Clinton, as the junior senator from New York and as secretary of state — has been named Gallup’s Most Admired Women of the Year 15 times. While she is extremely polarizing, she has always polled well among Democrats and women, and her hardworking, accommodating attitude as senator and secretary of state has won her fans among both Republican voters and the congressional Republican caucus. To this day — despite being out of office — Clinton ranks second among most admired Democrats, behind the current first lady Michelle Obama.
Taking on the Republicans
Clinton is the heavy-hitter many in the Democratic Party wish the president was. As Republicans embrace obstructionism as a valid political position, Democrats are looking for someone less willing to negotiate than to break the Republicans’ spirit. Paul Krugman of the New York Times called President Obama “President Pushover.” HBO’s Bill Maher called the president “wimpy and wussy.” Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich has spoke at length of the president’s “unwise, unnecessary concessions.” Political analyst James Carville quipped about the president, going as far as to say, “If Hillary Clinton gave Obama one of her balls, he’d have two.”
This could go on indefinitely, as a vast number of political commentators have spoken at end on the president’s perceived “softness.” The very qualities that Clinton was panned for in 2008 — her “abrasiveness,” her “hardness,” visages of Clinton as a “Margaret Thatcher-in-the-making,” etc. — are now actively being sought as a solution to the “Republican problem.”
“In this mood, Democrats may care a lot more about toughness and combativeness than about minute gradations of progressiveness,” wrote David Frum of the Daily Beast. “And about Hillary Clinton’s combativeness, nobody has ever had any doubts. Maybe she voted for the Iraq War when Barack Obama opposed it. Maybe her husband’s administration lightened regulation of the financial industry and cut capital gains taxes. So what? ‘You know you can count on me to stand up strong for you,’ Hillary Clinton told supporters in Pennsylvania on the night she won that state’s primary in 2008. ‘Standing up strong’ is what Democrats will be looking for in 2016. Affect will matter more than policy, and Hillary Clinton has the affect of the tough and decisive leader.”
Of all people, however, the one most aware of the difficulty a second presidential run will bring is Clinton herself. Given the fact that she is now celebrating a private life she hasn’t had in thirty years of public service, and the fact that — at age 69 on Election Day 2016 — only Ronald Reagan would have been older when first inaugurated, Clinton is less than eager to reveal her intentions before it is necessary. That said, the former first lady has given hints that she is considering a run — from her becoming a named member of her husband’s foundation to her recent “cheerleading” for the president’s Syria push.
“I think people close to her are more acutely aware than anybody else in the country that there’s no such thing as inevitability,” said a Democrat with ties to Clinton who requested anonymity to NBC News. “The expectations are just so out of whack,” the Democrat added, noting the results of her 2008 candidacy. “If her opponent gets 30 to 40 percent in Iowa – the first time she has to break a sweat, the media will write, ‘Is this The Collapse, Part II?’”
“I think one of the big differences between 2008 and now is that, back then, you had a rock star of similar caliber in the running, Sen. Obama,” said Phil Singer, an aide to Clinton during that campaign. “Inevitability wasn’t necessarily as credible as it is today.”
Clinton, Biden and the Democrats
The candidacy of Clinton may come at a high price, however. In December 2011, the Obama re-election team authorized a poll that asked voters in battleground states, “Would you be more likely to vote for Mr. Obama if Hillary Rodham Clinton were to campaign for him?” The vice president took umbrage to this, as it suggested the speculation that the president would choose Clinton to be his 2012 running mate.
Nothing, of course, came of this, but the situation shined light on a little-understood dynamic in the Obama administration. Biden and Clinton have been close friends ever since Clinton came to Washington in 1992. However, despite the fact that Biden held seniority in the administration, he always felt that he was in the shadow of Clinton — who remains the torchbearer for the Democratic Party today.
As Biden prepares for his third — and possibly last, considering he will be 73 in 2016 — attempt at the presidency, he’s finding himself eclipsed by his friend as the Democratic Party increasingly moving to support and endorse Clinton. Logically, the situation doesn’t make sense; a sitting vice-president that seeks his party’s nomination is usually a safe bet to win the candidacy — as it has happened for Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush and Al Gore.
Those close to the vice president feel that Biden’s accomplishments tend to be overlooked in comparison to Clinton’s. “He’s traveled nearly as much as Hillary; hundreds of thousands of miles he’s flown,” said John Marttila, a longtime adviser to Biden. “If you compared their travel records, it’s probably similar. And he’s had a more dedicated presence in Iraq than anyone.”
Many feel, however, that considering that Biden has a keen political sense, he is at peace with the realization that if Clinton runs, he can’t win. “Joe always says, ‘If you’re not on your way up, you’re on your way down,’ ” said a person close to the vice-president. A former administration official aide agreed, saying, “He needs to make people think he has skin in the game in the future so that they treat him relevant now.”
In the end, though, the whole of this situation is Clinton’s to settle. If she runs, she will face a wall of opposition built on eight years of hype and speculation, the ghosts of her past failures, including unsettled questions regarding the embassy attack at Benghazi, Libya while she was secretary of state, comparisons to her husband and doubts about her managerial capabilities. If she doesn’t run, she will be opening up the Democratic Party to a primaries fight that may irreplaceably split the base in a way that could permit a Republican win.
“For any non-Clinton Democrat, exploring the 2016 election is something of an exercise in perceived futility, at least for the moment,” wrote Alexander Burns for Politico. “She looms larger over the primary landscape than any undeclared candidate since perhaps Dwight Eisenhower, and the drop-off in prominence between her and the next tier of Democrats makes it all but impossible for any less famous politician to win consideration as a credible alternative.”
He added: “That is, unless Clinton doesn’t run.”
Clinton, however, may recognize the absurdity of the challenge before her, should she chose to accept it or not. At a travel agents’ convention in Miami, when asked what it will take to get a woman president elected, Clinton quipped, “Well, it’ll take a crazy person.”