It’s official now: Hillary Clinton has entered the presidential race. At the very least, this development guarantees that President Obama’s party will have one candidate to choose who enjoys near-universal name recognition and has a proven donor network ready to fund the long campaign. It means that unless they go elsewhere in search of a miracle, Democrats will not be any more hopeless in 2016 than Hillary Clinton is as a candidate.
Even so, this may not turn out to be the happy moment that the more naïve among the Democrats might have expected. They must now take a moment to evaluate and understand just how precarious their situation is.
The hopes and fears of the Democratic Party — as well as the hope that any changes from the Obama era will stick — now ride upon the shoulders of a white lady whose political career is a throwback to the 1990s, and who will be 69 years old on election day.
Perhaps this formula will work. Nostalgia for the Clinton presidency might well combine with a desire for a female president to animate the electorate and make 2016 look a lot like the Obama election years of 2008 or 2012.
Then again, those two successful Democratic elections had something in common that 2016 cannot legally have — namely, Barack Obama was on the ballot. That might seem like an obvious point, but Democrats may not be prepared for life after the man who, until this week, could claim to be the undisputed leader of their party. Obama inspired many first-time voters and drew many low-turnout constituencies to the polls. How many of them become less reliable voters in the future, or even prove to have been “last-time” voters in 2012?
Obama won two impressive presidential victories, but Democrats are loath to give him the credit he deserves. They are eager to brand themselves as an unstoppable political force in the nation’s new demographic mix, but what if their success has all been a function of Obama’s star power? What if they are fooling themselves to think that Obama magic can rub off on them — or on Hillary Clinton, or Martin O’Malley, or any other Democratic candidate for office going forward?
As a politician and strictly from the standpoint of skill, Clinton is a clear letdown after Obama. It’s not just that she utterly lacks her husband’s charisma and snap political judgment. She is also disappointingly ordinary when standing next to a rock star like Obama. He was the sort of historic, iconic figure that Clinton can never really be. And his electoral coalition cannot simply be reassembled at will in order to elect someone else — not even her.
The elections in the post-Obama era could well go back to looking more like 2004, when Republicans won 45 percent of young voters; when Democrats were still clobbered among white voters, but also ran up much smaller margins with Hispanic voters; where they drew smaller margins and lower levels of interest from black voters.
Democrats do not seem to have prepared for this possibility. They had better hope things go right with Team Clinton. The alternative must be a rather unpleasant possibility for them.
