An Awful Candidate

With her former president husband standing behind her slack-jawed — his mouth hung weirdly agape throughout her remarks — nearly the entire six-and-a-half-minute affair was pitched at a shout. Clinton’s eyes bulged, the thumb of her closed fist jabbed the air again and again. She proclaimed that she most certainly was a progressive and, as if to prove her bona fides, provided a list of rights that she pledged her sacred honor to defend.

“We have to be united against a Republican vision and candidates that would drive us apart and divide us,” she exhorted the crowd. It wasn’t just the logical dissonance of the line that was off-putting: a campaign whose placards proclaim “Fighting for Us” uniting against an opposition whose chief sin is divisiveness. The delivery was stilted. She emphasized the wrong words and lilted her voice upwards in midsentence as if asking a question, so that the line sounded like: “We have to be UNITED? — when it’s all said and DONE — we have to be UNITED? against a REPUBLICAN vision and candidates that would DRIVE us apart and divide us.”

It was the type of performance that brought home what an awful campaigner Clinton is. Or rather, has become. Because despite what you might think, she wasn’t always this bad.

One of the common misperceptions about the 2008 campaign is that Hillary Clinton gacked the nomination like a kicker pushing a 30-yard field goal into the sidelines. This is not quite right. She made a critical miscalculation in not spending enough to organize several small-state caucuses. That hurt her dearly. But she also suffered from several factors beyond her control: the left’s continuing rejection of the Iraq war, the media’s complicity in keeping John Edwards viable until he could wound her in Iowa, and the total solidarity of African-American voters with Barack Obama. Because of these developments, the Democratic party establishment abandoned her at the first opportunity, taking with it superdelegates, endorsements, and a giant pile of money, all of which it eagerly transferred to Obama. And despite all of this, Clinton still won more Democratic primary votes than Obama did— only to find out that the party of Al Gore was suddenly obsessed with procedural technicalities and no longer cared about raw vote totals.

The fact that she was able to win more votes than Obama in the face of such adversity is testament to her political grit. Clinton began that race as a soft, liberal feminist. But when it became clear that this coalition was no longer enough to win the nomination, she went out and assembled a new one on the fly. Always remember: When Barack Obama mocked Americans who bitterly cling to their guns and religion, he was talking about Clinton’s voters.

And not only was Clinton a reasonably good tactician, but as the campaign wore on she became a reasonably good candidate. She could never lay claim to her husband’s charm or Obama’s charisma. But she was feisty and tough. She could feign a reasonable degree of humility. Most important, she learned to play within her own abilities, never reaching for pitches she couldn’t command. As a political talent, you probably would have put her in the same class as John Kerry or Mitt Romney. I mean that as a compliment. Sort of.

But eight years is a long time and Clinton’s fastball isn’t what it used to be. In New Hampshire this week, her events are booked into Boys & Girls Clubs and high school cafeterias, rather than the big theaters, where Bernie Sanders plays to wild-eyed, adoring millennial mobs.

In the runup to showtime at a Clinton event, the campaign plays a 45-minute package of video clips of the candidate speaking. It seems as though about half of them feature her talking about “gay rights,” and in the most politically aggressive sense possible. In one clip, she laments that there are places in America today where gay couples “can even be denied a wedding cake,” suggesting that Clinton is on board with the most coercive Bake-Me-a-Cake! vision of gay rights.

She doesn’t strictly need to be. Sanders is mostly challenging her on economic issues. But since Clinton is unwilling to enter a bidding war with Sanders on socialism — she thinks it’s a terrible idea to offer free college tuition for everyone, and she insists that she will never raise taxes on the middle class — she seems to think she can counter him with identity politics. And guns.

If you’ve spent any time watching Hillary Clinton over the years, you may be surprised to learn that the subject she’s most passionate about right now is not health care, or job creation, or foreign affairs, or feminism, or The Children, but gun control. This may have something to do with the fact that gun control is the only issue on which Clinton has been able to position herself firmly to Sanders’s left.

Which is why at most campaign stops in New Hampshire, Clinton is introduced first by former astronaut Mark Kelly and then by Kelly’s wife, Gabrielle Giffords, the former member of Congress from Arizona who was shot in the head in 2011 and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Kelly speaks movingly about Giffords’s and Clinton’s ability to fight through adversity. Giffords, who has difficulty talking, then says a few words — no more than a handful of sentences — before introducing Clinton. And the candidate then opens her remarks by talking about gun control. This routine is repeated several times a day, across the state. It is as ghoulish as it is transparent.

In the stump speeches that follow, Clinton is every bit as terrible as she was on caucus night in Iowa. Her delivery alternates between quiet grimace and angry shout. And then there are her inflections and cadences.

The actor Christopher Walken famously takes scripts and removes all the punctuation from his lines so that he can come at the dialogue in fresh, unexpected ways. Clinton seems to have done something similar. Talking about Republicans, for instance, she says, “They will RIP? away the progress we have made, SET? us back, and if they HAVE? their way, they will RETURN? to trickle-down economics, which will MAKE? it even HARDER? [pause] to FIX? the problems that we still have to deal with from the Great Recession.” Walken’s strange line readings make his performances oddly memorable; Clinton’s make hers vaguely unsettling.

And that’s just the performance part. The stump speech itself is a formless hodgepodge. She hugs Obama, she name-checks Planned Parenthood, she talks about an unspecified plan to defeat ISIS. In extended haiku form, her speech is essentially this:

Guns.

You have to fight. People will knock you down.

You have to get back up.

And fight.

Obama. Obamacare. Bill Clinton. ’90s.

Republicans bad.

Green energy.

Raise taxes on the rich.

Guns.

You don’t have to be part of the vast right-wing conspiracy to get the sense that Clinton’s campaign is angry and negative. Partly this impression comes from her affect. (“I’ve got so many things that infuriate me,” she volunteered at a rally in Derry.) Partly it comes from her vision of the future: When she says America must “stay on this hard path we have walked together” in the Obama years, it sounds more like a forced march than a grand adventure. But mostly it’s because of her continual reference to fighting, which recurs in nearly every section of every speech. She’s a “fighter.” It’s important to “Fight. Fight. Fight.” She’s “fighting for us.”

The only time Clinton doesn’t want to fight is when she talks about the Sanders single-payer health care plan. Here is her explanation for why single-payer is a bad idea: “He wants us to start all over. I think that would be a terrible mistake: to throw our country into a contentious debate over health care AGAIN?” Worthy of scorched-earth warfare: Planned Parenthood and gay wedding cakes. Not worthy of a big fight: universal health care. You can see why the more liberal elements of the party aren’t in love.

On the stump, it’s striking how bereft Clinton is of both humor and joy. How can you have a speech that takes shots at Donald Trump and isn’t funny? Somehow, she does it. She’s against free college, she says, because “I will not pay for Donald Trump’s kids to go to college.” That’s her big laugh line; try the veal.

Even the grit of 2008 is gone, replaced with a rote weariness. For instance, the end of her speech — literally the last passage she gives to crowds before the music comes up — isn’t a promise or a call to action. It’s just a string of phrases: “The work of my life has been to lift up people— particularly kids — to help solve problems, to overcome obstacles, to lead with my heart, combined with my experience, my judgment, and my commitment and determination, to serve you, to win your support.” It is not difficult to imagine the many, many focus-group sessions that went into crafting this litany of non sequiturs. And her political instincts, such as they were, seem to have deserted her altogether. Asked by Anderson Cooper at a town hall event about being paid $675,000 in speaking fees by Goldman Sachs her response was—hand to God—”Well I don’t KNOW? That’s what they offered.”

The Hillary Clinton of 2008 was more vulnerable than she looked. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 is more vulnerable still. She has regressed as a candidate, and it’s already hurting her. Barring indictment, she’ll probably grind her way to the nomination. But already, the Iowa entrance poll numbers portend problems for her down the road. Among voters ages 17 to 29, Sanders beat her by an incredible 84 percent to 14 percent. Among voters 30 to 44, Sanders was only 21 points ahead. It takes a good candidate to turn out voters in the general election who were cool to them in the primaries.

And Hillary Clinton’s best days as a candidate are behind her.

Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.