It’s early days yet, but Hillary Clinton is already running what looks like the classic campaign of a loser — in contrast to those once run by her husband — in two different and critical ways. Bill’s campaigns resembled those waged by his fellow winners — Carter, Reagan, Bush 43 and Obama. Hillary’s recall those of what we can call the loser group — Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
One thing the winners had in common is that they headed teams of fanatically loyal home-grown advisors who understood, knew, and loved them, and stayed loyal to them when things became thorny — as things quickly did in each case. No one knew Pat Caddell, James Carville, Karl Rove or David Axelrod before they elected a president.
In contrast, each member of the loser group employed hired guns with big names and huge egos, who used them to pay for vacations in Tuscany, waged vicious turf wars with professional rivals, and sometimes turned on their former employers if and when things went south.
Hillary’s effort in 2008 was rife with dissension. Her efforts this year haven’t gone smoothly, as she fights to fold veterans from the Obama team into a Clinton machinery built up over decades without breaking egos or eggs. “Lingering tensions between [her] loyalists and the strategists who helped President Obama defeat her … have erupted into an intense public struggle,” the New York Times recently reported.
“He’s a cancer,” an Obama aide working for Clinton called an old Clinton loyalist. This is not promising, and with Clinton the only game in town for unemployed Democrats, things could quickly go downhill from there.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran as an authentic New Democrat, Bush 43 was a compassionate conservative, and Obama and Reagan were equally well self-defined. On the other hand, Al Gore had gone from the hawkish social and southern Democrat of 1988 to the New Democrat of 1992 who was Bill Clinton’s soulmate, to the extreme social liberal he ran as in the 2000 election.
John Kerry tried to run in 2004 as the war hero he was, but not only had he voted for a bill before voting against it, but the young lieutenant in crisp Navy whites was compromised by the shaggy-haired pacifist he turned into later, who had accused his war comrades of terrible crimes.
Mitt Romney ran in 2002 as a liberal who wanted to govern Massachusetts, and in 2008 offered himself to Republicans as a pro-life conservative, and then in 2012 described himself as ‘severely conservative,’ in an effort to win them again.
Each of these lost when they struck people as having no beliefs other than that they deserved to be president. And right now, Hillary Clinton looks a lot more like this kind of candidate than like Reagan, Bush, or Obama (who cleverly ran as a kind of messiah), or even her own husband, Bill.
Bill ran with and on his DLC platform, but Hillary never bought into that concept. What’s more, she lives as if she’s been told all her life she was so special that she deserved to have and be anything. Her problem has been getting voters as enthused about herself as she is, leaving her to:
A) Play the woman card, which becomes less specific to her as many more women rise to high office; and B) go the Gore/Kerry/Romney route of trying to bend herself into the image of what polls suggest voters find appealing.
Does this mean that she’ll lose? No, it’s early, and no one knows what woes may befall her opponent. But there are two tracks you can take when running for president, and so far she is on the wrong one.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
