Des Moines — There’s no other way to say it: Hillary Clinton is very boring. The Democratic presidential frontrunner’s campaign stops are, too. The members of her traveling press corps look like they’d rather be anywhere else. So do some of the attendees, who shift in their seats starting around minute 10. Even the campaign staffers pace the back of the room or tap inattentively on their iPhones as Clinton drones on about finding a cure for Alzheimer’s and universal pre-kindergarten.
At a recent “organizing event” at the State Historical Building, in the shadow of Iowa’s capitol dome, Clinton’s supporters are getting restless before the candidate’s even arrived. Somewhere in the crowd, a chant breaks out. “When I say ‘Madam’ you say ‘President,’ ” someone orders. “Madam!”
“President!” a diffuse, halfhearted chorus responds. The cheer lasts for just another minute or two, dying down as quickly as it arose. Then, with hardly a warning, the candidate walks onstage, joined by agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and his wife. The audience bursts into applause when they see Clinton, which turns out to be the emotional high point of the evening. Vilsack, by way of introduction, tells a too-long story about inviting Clinton to an embarrassingly small fundraiser in 1998 when she was the first lady and he was the unknown and underdog candidate for governor.
When Vilsack finally passes the microphone to Clinton herself, it’s a relief, albeit short-lived. For some reason, Clinton decides to tell her side of the nonstory, regaling the crowd with the mind-numbing details of conversations with her East Wing political team, who assured her Vilsack “doesn’t have a chance.” She took a gamble and, in an exciting conclusion . . . raised money for him anyway. In the back of the room, a baby starts screaming.
Thankfully, Clinton soon moves on to deliver her stump speech, the main theme of which is: Do you really want to see a Republican in the White House? She tries a laugh line. “Now, I’ve been listening to our Republican friends who are running for the office. Yeah, it is a little daunting. They are quite—” she pauses, making sure the crowd is paying attention, “—evidence averse.” There are some polite chuckles, more than when she used the line in Davenport earlier in the day and felt compelled to tell that audience to “think about it.”
Clinton plods through sentences like she’s avoiding rhetorical booby traps, which has the effect of giving far too much weight to light observations. In warning against a return to the GOP’s “trickle-down economics,” Clinton deploys a clichéd aphorism at a glacial pace, as if her audience is hearing it for the first time. “Heaven forbid, you know that old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” she says, nodding her head approvingly.
She struggles to transition between topics, and she employs jarring shifts in tone. Often, she lowers the volume and softens her timbre when turning to very serious issues, like our children. “We need enough support to be able to really wrap our arms, both literally and figuratively, around every child, and give those kids a chance to show us what they can do, to make their contributions,” she says in Davenport, her voice barely above a whisper, her face twitching at the thought of some kid somewhere not given a chance to make his or her contributions.
Suddenly, she ratchets up the volume and energy. “And then we’ve got to make college affordable,” she shouts, thrusting her index finger outward and upward. “And I have a plan to do that!”
Foreign policy and national security issues make scant appearances in the Clinton stump speech; there’s a brief mention of “reaching out” to American Muslims for help fighting terrorism. Mostly, the former secretary of state spends her time hawking a soft liberal agenda on minor domestic issues: autism, drug addiction, mental health, early childhood education. Clinton ticks off the items like she’s reciting her times tables.
If Clinton’s dullness isn’t deliberate, it’s certainly convenient, serving the campaign’s desire to make as little news and noise as possible as she trudges through a mildly competitive primary season on her way to the nomination and the media stay focused on the much more entertaining Republican race. In fact, Clinton is running a conservative campaign, in strategy if not in politics. That explains why, in Davenport, she talks fondly of the good times of her husband’s administration and promises to defend the gains made under Barack Obama. While Obama-era Democrats brashly boast that their chief policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is here to stay, Clinton strikes an almost reactionary chord.
“The Republicans just want to undo what Democrats fought for for decades and what President Obama got accomplished,” she says. “So we need a president, just as President Obama will, to veto that. But if there’s a Republican sitting there, it will be repealed, and then we’ll have to start all over again.”
And that’s the biggest fear Clinton’s even-keel campaign hopes to stoke in 2016: Voting for the other side would be a radical departure, a disruptive shake-up that will force us to “start all over again.” It’s a direct counterargument to the revolutionary populism not only of Donald Trump in the GOP but of Bernie Sanders in her own party. Clinton is counting on Democrats this primary season and swing voters in November to opt for playing it safe.
In a tumultuous time at home and abroad, with a third Democratic term on the line and a Republican primary out of control, Clinton’s may be just the winning strategy. But it sure is boring.
Michael Warren is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
