The Clinton campaign has been pretty smart so far.
And the best evidence of the campaign’s intelligence is that they’ve done a great job of hiding their terrible candidate. Seriously: Hillary Clinton functions best as a candidate when she’s in witness relocation and exists only as a vague memory in voter’s minds. And outside of one set speech tying Trump to the alt-right, can you recall a single word Clinton has said in public since the convention?
Now you might take this as a sign of weakness: The Clinton campaign is so bad they won’t let anyone interview Clinton! And I don’t disagree. I’ve been writing about Clinton’s vulnerabilities for the better part of two years. But flip the telescope around for a second and think of it this way: The Clinton campaign understands its own deficiencies and acts accordingly. And then ask yourself what you’d give for the Trump campaign to have the same level of self-awareness.
So that’s Exhibit A of the Clinton campaign’s intelligence. Exhibit B is what they did to Trump on the final night of the Democratic convention.
The third day of the Democratic convention featured four of the most effective political speeches I’ve ever seen. Which was great for Clinton, except that it also created a problem for her. Because there is no universe in which she is capable of delivering a good speech.
So what did the campaign do? They tucked a little landmine into the program—the Khan speech, a short, seemingly throw-away affair which weirdly aired in primetime on the final night, just ahead of the Democratic nominee’s acceptance speech. And 24 hours later, no one in America cared a bit about how bad Clinton’s speech was. The only thing anyone remembered was that Donald Trump spent two weeks attacking a Gold Star family.
The entire set-piece borders on strategic brilliance: The Democrats understood their weakness as well as the weaknesses of their opponent. They conceived a plan to minimize their own and maximize the other’s both through guile and the leveraging of their strengths. And then they executed the maneuvers accordingly. You don’t have to like it to be impressed by it.
The Khan gambit certainly left an impression on me. It led me to believe that the Clinton operation is more clear-eyed and less candidate-beholden than I had previously thought. And it leads me now to suspect that the campaign will not suffer from a failure of imagination in preparing for the Trump debate–which is the biggest danger for Clinton.
One last thing: Remember that for Trump, the downside exposure doesn’t end with the closing bell of the debate. If things don’t go well for him, or if Clinton says something that gets under his skin, or–heck–even if he has a terrific night, there’s a good chance that Trump fires off some Android tweets in the aftermath that take over the news cycle in ways that cannot be spun as 15-dimensional chess.
