Democrats are banking that an uptick in economic confidence, stabilizing approval ratings for President Obama and his increasingly populist tone will ease efforts to hand Hillary Clinton the keys to the White House.
They may want to temper that enthusiasm, however.
Though the White House views Obama’s defiant attitude in the wake of brutal midterm losses as liberating for a lame-duck president asserting his relevance, it might not make for good 2016 politics.
Even those close to Obama are warning of the difficulty of getting the president and his former secretary of state in sync.
“I don’t think the ‘Obama’s third-term’ label is as daunting for Hillary as it was in November,” a former Obama senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “But that doesn’t get her to 270 [electoral votes], either. She has to find a way to take the most effective parts of the Obama middle-class argument — but make them her own and make them seem fresh. I think there’s still plenty of questions about how she does that.”
While White House aides dismiss the suggestion that Obama’s growing focus on wage inequality has 2016 undertones, the president clearly wants to lay the populist foundation for a platform that Clinton can embrace when she likely jumps into the 2016 contest this summer.
Republicans say Clinton might not be the ideal surrogate for such a message.
“The bigger problem is that President Obama and the Democratic Party are in a different place than Hillary Clinton is,” argued Republican strategist Patrick Griffin. “Obama is the populist left of the party and Hillary is more of a centrist Democrat. Is this Obama’s party or Hillary’s party or Elizabeth Warren’s party?”
On Hillary, Griffin added, “This is the case of a movie that gets so much advance box office, then the premiere happens — and everybody says, ‘hmm, not so good.'”
As Obama braces for a combative final two years with Republicans, he’ll have to convince Americans that he’s not responsible for a dysfunctional Washington, even as the head of government.
Furthermore, the president doesn’t have anything left in his toolkit to rival the breadth of his executive action on immigration, which has earned him decidedly mixed reviews among the independent voters Clinton will certainly covet — and a rebuke from the courts.
Republicans have already devoted many months to tying Clinton to Obama, particularly on foreign policy, which has been a thorn in the president’s side throughout his second term. Any hope Clinton had of framing her time at Foggy Bottom as prep work for the presidency, Republicans insist, is now decidedly an albatross for her White House hopes.
Though Obama’s standing with the public has improved, his approval ratings generally hover around the mid-40s, still eclipsed by his disapproval marks.
Party strategists say Clinton will need to keep her space from Obama to better her chances in 2016.
“Hillary can’t run on his record,” said Democratic strategist Doug Schoen, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. “If she runs on the Obama record — a president with a 44 percent approval rating — she’s going to lose.”
The White House counters that Democrats already tried to keep their distance from Obama in November’s midterms, which led to disastrous results.
And Obama hardly appears interested in going quietly during the waning moments of his presidency, putting little stock in the idea that the midterms were a referendum on his policies.
“Here’s our program. What’s yours?” Obama said in a direct challenge to Republicans at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting earlier this month. “Tell us how you’re helping middle-class families, because we’ve got an agenda and we know it works. Don’t just talk about it.”
