| In what I would have to consider an extremely strange move for the primary season, it appears Hillary Clinton has started using a new stump speech that trumpets her status as an insider and her willingness to compromise with Republicans. Those are not exactly her words, but they are pretty darn close:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York unveiled a new stump speech on Sunday, outlining the "four big goals" she would have as president and saying she was willing to "work within the system" and make "principled compromises" to achieve them.(…)
"From my time in the White House and in the Senate, I learned you bring change by working in the system established by the Constitution," Mrs. Clinton said at an early afternoon rally in Concord, drawing a pointed contrast to the outsider messages of Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards. Referring to the Roosevelts and Johnson, she said, "They got big things done because they knew it wasn't just about the dream, it's about the results."
"I want to work within the system," Mrs. Clinton said. "You can't pretend the system doesn't exist."
Um, OK. I have looked in vain to find the entire speech online, but those quotes from the New York Times will have to do for now. It is certainly an interesting tactic to basically start using a variation of the attacks of your two closest opponents, John Edwards and Barack Obama, as a means of selling yourself to voters. In this speech, she is presenting herself as an insidery technocrat, which is unusual as it breaks from the typical red meat diet voters receive from candidates in a primary campaign. Further, telling people that you plan to compromise ahead of time is also unusual as it comes at Obama and Edwards from the right. Outside of her inexplicable comments on nuclear weapons, from her vote against funding the war to her partisan rhetoric on electability, this is a direction she has refused to engage so far. If Clinton keeps using this language, it will become much easier for either Edwards or Obama to label Clinton as an agent of compromise and a self-identified insider. If they are willing to step up, and slightly redirect their attacks, it seems like she is playing into their hands.
Then again, while this seems like dangerous territory for Clinton, it is just so crazy that it might work. One of the things we discovered last year in the MyDD / Wright Consulting / Courage Campaign Strategy Memo for Democratic Congressional Challengers is that the electorate does not really believe that one party or one individual is going to bring about any sweeping change in Washington. Given this, I have to wonder if there might be a strange brilliance behind Clinton using this sort of language. While most candidates seem to talk of igniting grandiose change in Washington that never happens, perhaps voters will hear what Clinton is saying and be relieved by her honesty. Everyone thinks Clinton is the consummate insider, and many progressives think she is too willing to compromise. So, as with her lobbyist comment at the Yearly Kos candidates forum, rather than engaging in a contorted denial no one would believe and then improbably trying to recreate her image as an outsider even though no one will ever see her as such, she instead just comes out stating that yes she is an insider, and yes she thinks compromise can be good. This could very well work, as it will make Clinton look comfortable in her own skin, and make it appear as though she has nothing to hide.
Whether or not this helps or hurts Clinton, either way, I think this new language she is using will serve as an interesting test of Peter Daou's Triangle theory (Peter is currently a senior staff member of Hillary Clinton's campaign.) Albeit with a different tone and different qualifiers, Clinton is now saying the same things about herself that progressive bloggers have been saying about her for a long time: she is too much of an insider and her centrist leanings make her far too quick to compromise with Republicans. As such, after nibbling around the edges of this critique for a while and never naming names, the door now seems open for Edwards, Obama or someone else to broadly and vociferously adopt the most common anti-Clinton critique seen in the progressive blogosphere and potentially create a new narrative around Clinton in so doing. If I understand Daou's "triangle" theory correctly, if the most common progressive blogosphere critique of Hillary Clinton were picked up by multiple non-Clinton campaigns, that critique would become legitimate in the eyes of the media as both the progressive blogosphere and campaigns X, Y and Z would all be saying the same thing about Hillary Clinton. It is only at that point, and not a moment before, that it is possible the established media would start to repeat the blogosphere's critique of Hillary Clinton, and thus a new, potentially damaging conventional wisdom surrounding her would be born.
Then again, to pivot a third time in this post, this might never become conventional for two reasons. First, it is possible that no other Democratic campaign will attack her as too eager to compromise with Republicans after spending the last month making electability based comments about her high unfavorables. Second, even if other campaigns do adopt this critique, the media might not accept it as legitimate because of the way she has been attacked by Republicans both in the past and in the now. So, there might be some real barriers toward making this attack stick.
Still, at the very least, I now think the door has opened quite a bit for any non-Clinton Democratic candidate to start using the most common critique of Hillary Clinton in the progressive blogosphere. With Clinton herself basically repeating that critique, if adopted by other campaigns it has the potential of portraying her as a compromising, insidery Democrat just like our Congressional leadership that has failed to do much about the war. That leadership has seen its approval rating crash among liberals and progressives since the first capitulation vote. If Clinton develops a similar image among the rank and file, it will become much more difficult for her to win the nomination. |
