The Triumph of Experience Over Hope

As Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics astutely points out, Clinton and Barack Obama had an almost even split among voters who decided just before the election. Obama won voters who decided a month to three days before the election. And Clinton won easily among voters who decided more than a month before they went to the polls (48 percent to 31 percent). In other words, Clinton’s victory wasn’t the result of voters’ changing their minds at the last minute; it was the result of Clinton voters’ being mobilized.

The candidate’s moist eyes might have helped put a few more bodies in the voting booths. But in the last 72 hours of the race, the Clinton campaign radically altered its message to voters, and these changes probably had at least as much of an effect on her turnout.

As Obama surged in Iowa, Hillary Clinton focused heavily on her biography and tried, clumsily, to snatch the mantle of “change” from him. The closest she came to attacking her rivals was to say that “some people think you get change by demanding it and some people think you get change by hoping for it.”

She used this same formulation at a gathering of 3,500 New Hampshire Democratic party donors the night after Iowa and was booed by Obama supporters. The next day, Clinton began trying out different messages on the campaign trail. At the Saint Anselm debate, she sketched out a critique of Obama as being untrustworthy, noting that he had “changed positions within three years on .  .  . a range of issues.” Clinton noted that Obama had changed his mind on the scope and kind of health care reform he favored. As a Senate candidate, Obama had said he would vote against the Patriot Act and would oppose the Iraq war, Clinton pointed out; once in office, he voted for both the Patriot Act and the appropriations bill for the war.

Later in the debate, Clinton directly attacked Obama’s theme of hope, saying that voters needed a “reality check” and that it was wrong to give them “false hope.” And during a discussion about withdrawal from Iraq, Clinton observed, “I don’t think anyone can predict what the consequences will be, and I think we have to be ready for whatever they might be.”

The next day, Sunday, Clinton held a rally in Nashua where she expanded on these themes. Prefacing her remarks by stipulating that her opponents were “good people,” she proclaimed, “If you give a speech saying that you are going to vote against the Patriot Act, and you don’t–that’s not change. If you say that you are working to prevent members of Congress from having lunch with lobbyists, but they can have meals standing up–that’s not change. If you say you passed a patient’s bill of rights but you forget to add that it never got turned into law–that’s not change.” Clinton went on painting Obama, and to a lesser degree Edwards, as unreliable over-promisers, using specific examples. She would repeat this litany many times on the stump over the next 48 hours.

In Nashua she also began trying to use Obama’s oratorical skills against him, claiming that there was a difference between “rhetoric and reality.” Quoting the old Mario Cuomo line, she insisted that “you campaign in poetry .  .  . you govern in prose.”

Monday began with the near-tear incident at an early-morning event in Portsmouth. A few hours later, Clinton was in Dover where a local voter named Francine Torge introduced her, saying, “One of the other candidates has been compared to JFK. And he was a wonderful leader who gave us a lot of hope. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson actually did all his good work and got Republicans and Democrats to pass a lot of his measures.”

The campaign disavowed Torge’s bizarre remarks. Yet the Hillary-LBJ comparison seems to be the Clinton campaign’s concept. That same afternoon, Clinton praised Lyndon Johnson for passing the Civil Rights Act. Still later in the day she brought up Johnson again, saying, “You know, today Senator Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to criticize me. He basically compared himself to our greatest heroes because they gave great speeches. President Kennedy was in Congress for 14 years. He was a war hero. He was a man of great accomplishments and readiness to be president. .  .  . Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement. He was gassed. He was beaten. He was jailed. And he gave a speech that was one of the most beautifully, profoundly important speeches ever written in America, the ‘I have a dream’ speech. And then he worked with President Johnson to get the civil rights laws passed.”

During her Dover appearance, Clinton also talked about the world being a dangerous place. She cited the example of Gordon Brown and the two U.K. terrorist attacks which followed his taking office. She claimed that it was not an accident that terrorists decided to “test” him just after he came to power. “I hope I don’t face any of those” types of tests, she said. “But if I do, I’ll be ready.”

While Hillary Clinton was in Dover, Bill Clinton was in Hanover, complaining that Obama had gotten a free ride from the press. In a fit of pique, President Clinton called Obama’s antiwar posture “a fairy tale.” On the next day, voters went to the polls and gave Hillary Clinton a victory.

The campaign’s wild, almost blind, swinging looked desperate because it was. And some of Clinton’s messages (warning against “false hope”; holding up the legislative accomplishments of Lyndon Johnson) are easily ridiculed. Yet they were effective in motivating voters–particularly the women, who gave her the decisive edge in New Hampshire.

It’s unclear which messages worked best: the warnings about Obama’s inexperience; or perhaps the charges that he is less of a change agent than he appears. What is clear is that Hillary Clinton can take a punch–and throw several in return. We still don’t know if the same can be said for Obama.

Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.