Ottumwa, Iowa
“You know, there’s a lot of talk about change in this election,” Hillary Clinton told a Des Moines gathering of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. “And there should be. But you know, change happens, whether you do anything or not. The world is always changing. Our challenge is: How do we master that change and make it work for America again? Everybody’s got ideas about change. You know, some people think you get change by demanding it. Some people think you get change by hoping for it. But I believe you get change by working really hard. . . . I’ve been a change-maker for 35 years.”
During a four-minute stretch Clinton used the word change 15 times. Which is exactly what her campaign has done in Iowa over the last few weeks.
Clinton had been leading the polls here since the end of summer. She had run an error-free campaign, with the exception of one debate gaffe where she endorsed giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. But Barack Obama began rising in late August, and in the last week of November he passed Clinton in some polls. So Clinton made some changes.
In a daring display of brazenness, she attacked Obama for both fundraising improprieties and excessive ambition. New Hampshire co-chair Bill Shaheen was trotted out to question the past drug use Obama himself had freely admitted in a memoir published 12 years ago–and was promptly jettisoned from the campaign when the attack backfired. Clinton even ditched the campaign’s theme song, Celine Dion’s “You and I.” And after months of promoting the idea of “strength and experience” on the stump, she pivoted to talk about her biography and the mantra of “change.”
The “change” campaign was rolled out during a five-day, 99-county barnstorming tour which saw Clinton hopping from town to town in the “Hill-A-Copter.” (This was not the first ill-named vehicle on the Clinton campaign; in the fall she took a short tour aboard a bus dubbed “The Middle Class Express,” which sounds like cut-price airline seating.)
Joined by President Clinton, Magic Johnson, retired general Wesley Clark, and other surrogates, Clinton remade her pitch to Iowans, in both form and substance. She abandoned the lectern and took to striding back and forth across the stage, microphone in hand. She hammered the change theme at every opportunity. Her campaign banners now proclaimed “Hillary: the Change we Need!” and “Working For Change, Working For You.” Even the folks doing introductions were roped into the act. In Ottumwa, the poor Ordinary American introducing Clinton had trouble delivering the ham-fisted text given to her. She haltingly read, “I know that . . . Hillary is . . . a . . . change-agent because . . . she has been doing this all her life.”
The problem for Clinton is that she follows her call for change by citing a failure to bring change, her 1993 attempt at creating government-run health care. “When I was fortunate enough to go to Washington to be part of my husband’s team,” she says, “we tackled one of the hardest problems we have: health care. . . . And we weren’t successful the first time, but you know what? I’m glad we tried. And I learned a lot, because we were standing up for what was right.” The dissonance is jarring–though, who knows? The “Hillary as Change-Maker” theme calls to mind George W. Bush’s response to a McCain surge early in the 2000 primary season: Bush reinvented himself as the “Reformer with Results”–and went on to win the nomination.
While health care is the centerpiece of the new Clinton campaign, she still mentions a few other issues. One of her big applause lines is, “We are going to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind!” The crowds love it, although no one seems aware that she voted for No Child Left Behind. And while her speeches are mostly free of policy substance, she paused midway through her five-day tour to roll out a few nanny-state proposals: a 90-day halt to home foreclosures, a five-year freeze on rate adjustments for subprime mortgages, and federal assistance for weatherizing homes.
On Iraq, however, Clinton really does seem to be changing. For most of the campaign she has tried to evade the question of Iraq, mentioning it only in passing. To this end she developed an effective tactic: Her standard line is to say that as president she will “bring our troops home from Iraq”–here there is always tremendous applause, but she barrels through it, quickly adding–“as quickly and responsibly as possible.” In practice, it’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, to hear that important qualifier.
She used that formulation at the beginning of the change tour, but on day three she used a new one: “I’ve had a historian tell me that this may be the most difficult set of challenges since Harry Truman succeeded Franklin Roosevelt,” she said. “We have two wars: one to end, and one to fight and to win.” It was the first time I’ve heard her openly reject the idea of victory in Iraq. Sure enough, day five of the tour became Iraq day, where she claimed that ending the Iraq war would be her “top priority” as president, with the first soldiers pulling out within 60 days of her inauguration. So much for “as quickly and responsibly as possible.”
There were other signs in Iowa that Clinton was lurching without thinking. Some took the form of nonsequiturs. Talking about the S-chip program, she claimed, “We’re fighting with George W. Bush who’d rather give no-bid contracts to Halliburton than give health care to American children.” When in doubt, trot out Halliburton. Speaking about fiscal responsibility, she said, “We need to quit borrowing so much money from foreign countries. We are in debt to countries from China to Mexico. We borrow billions of dollars from them to give to the Saudis to buy oil.” Which isn’t quite how it works, but never mind. In another speech she said that acupuncture and other “nontraditional” medical practices ought to be covered by health insurance.
Yet, despite everything, it’s not clear that the campaign should be as panicked as it seems to be. Clinton still leads in some of the Iowa polls, and her crowds were large and supportive, if not overly enthusiastic. Partly that may have to do with age. Clinton went out of her way to poke fun at her own age (60), presumably to draw a contrast with the 46-year-old Obama. And the people at her events were overwhelmingly older, with the median age probably between 45 and 50.
These more mature voters may lack the intensity of Obama’s hip, Facebooked masses. But on Caucus Day, January 3, Iowa’s three big universities will be on winter break, and young people will be distracted by parties and the Orange Bowl. By contrast, Clinton’s supporters aren’t going anywhere. “We keep track, because it started, last spring, us noticing that we had a lot of people in their 90s who wanted to caucus for us,” Hillary told one crowd. “So we started keeping our list of people in their 90s. Well the other day, we broke through the barrier–a 102-year-old man is determined to caucus for us, and he’s asked his 81-year-old son to take him.”
Clinton’s back-to-the-future type of change may be just their cup of tea.
Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
