Seven years ago, Hillary Clinton learned the hard way that talking about policy and credentials was no match for lofty promises and the race card.
This time things will be different.
Many pundits, mainly on the Right, have assumed all along that her strategy would be similar to President Obama’s — that the only way you could disagree with their policies is if you’re a racist or, obviously in Hillary’s case, sexist. And now that strategy has become crystal clear.
In Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday, Clinton spoke to a room full of women at a Silicon Valley technology conference. Although she said that “There has never been a better time to be a woman in the history of the world,” the rest of her remarks — and her campaign strategy — seems to be based on the opposite view; that it’s really terrible to be a woman right now.
Clinton appears to be making the shift toward running a campaign based on women’s issues. Bloomberg reporters Lisa Lerer and Jennifer Epstein explained the strategy:
“Clinton has stacked her public schedule with events focused on women’s issues, has wrapped her State Department legacy in what she did for women and girls across the globe, and sprinkles her public remarks with commentary about being a grandmother and jokes about her love of ‘charismatic, attractive’ men,” the reporters wrote. “Family-friendly policies that appeal to working women voters, like equal pay, family leave, and more affordable child care, have become central themes of her speeches — a notable shift from eight years ago, when Clinton rarely focused on the topics.”
Side note: Imagine if a male candidate (especially a Republican) joked about his love of “charismatic, attractive” women.
This latest reinvention of Clinton, as Lerer and Epstein note, requires her to shift away from her 2008 strategy of being “an experienced Iron Lady, ready to take that 3 a.m. phone call” and focus on identity politics.
“People around her were saying don’t play up being a woman, it could be a vulnerability,” Clinton’s 2008 senior adviser Maria Cardona told Bloomberg. “She’s running in a different time, and because she’s running in a different time she’s embracing these issues differently.”
The times, they are a changin’, and nowadays, identity politics matter more than any actual policy positions or accomplishments.
But if Clinton’s top aides — who are actually mostly men, by the way — think she can run by mostly talking about women’s issues, they could be in for a major disappointment.
Although Obama was praised as the potential first African-American president in 2008, he did not make that his main campaign focus. His aides and the media played up that angle, but Obama avoided running a campaign that focused specifically on issues important to African-Americans.
So maybe Clinton could turn out record numbers of women, especially unmarried women, who tend to vote Democratic (no guarantee that married women, who tend to vote Republican, would make the switch, however). But if her platform of largely focusing on women’s issues turns off male voters, the strategy could fail, as it did for former Democratic Sen. Mark “Uterus” Udall in Colorado.
Democrats have a huge problem with white male voters. If that group feels threatened by Clinton’s women focus and returns unusually large Republican margins, that will help the GOP nominee. If white male Democrats don’t think they’d be adequately represented by Clinton, they could stay home, while white male Republicans could be galvanized into voting against her.
So before she goes down this path, Clinton might want to study Udall’s failures.
