Hillary’s Challenge: Dealing With Bill and Barack

Photograph by Daniel AckerThe New York TimesRedux
Photograph by Daniel Acker/The New York Times/Redux

Given the advance of satellite technology and the pressure on editorial budgets, you might have thought that the bean counters at the networks and other media outlets would have agreed upon a pooling system for events such as the weekend appearance at Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry, in Iowa, by Hillary and Bill Clinton. Not so. This is another case where individual self-interest militates against an economically efficient collective solution. And that’s great. Rather than having to rely on a single pool report or the local papers, we have a wide range of dispatches to go by.

Courtesy of Philip Rucker and Dan Balz, here is Monday’s news lede from the Washington Post: “Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped back into the partisan fray here Sunday, framing the November midterm elections as ‘a choice between the guardians of gridlock and the champions of shared opportunity’ and warning Democrats of the consequences of complacency.”

As far as it went, that was accurate and helpful. (It’s good to see that the Clinton speechwriters still know how to use alliteration.) Before we get to 2016, or even 2015, we all have to get through the midterms. But if you are willing to believe that Hillary’s primary purpose in travelling to Indianola, a small town south of Des Moines, was to influence the outcome this November, I have a bridge, and several 2007 vintage CDOs, that I think might interest you.

Politico’s Maggie Haberman, in her report, made clear up front that Hillary was preparing the ground for her Presidential campaign and seeking to lay some ghosts in a spot where she lost a key 2008 primary to Barack Obama. It was, Haberman wrote, Hillary’s “first step toward moving past her phobia of the state that helped shatter her 2008 presidential hopes.” Hillary didn’t acknowledge this, of course, or even that she’s running again. “It is true, I am thinking about it,” she said. “But for today, that’s not why I am here.”

Until they officially declare for office, candidates are allowed a few fibs. The crowd, which the Des Moines Register estimated at about ten thousand, gave Hillary a warm reception, and she appeared to enjoy herself. After starting out with a rousing “Hello, Iowa, I’m ba-a-a-ck!,” she delivered a twenty-minute speech that hit most of the right notes. She talked about the economic challenges facing middle-class families, called for equal pay for women, delivered a well-earned tribute to Harkin’s long career in the Senate, and endorsed Bruce Braley, the Democratic candidate who is trying to replace him.

For many political insiders, though, the real topic of interest was how Hillary would deal with her husband, Bill, and her former boss Barack Obama, both of whom loom large over her prospective campaign. In 2008, according to the conventional wisdom touted by campaign books, Bill’s indiscipline was a significant handicap to her. Now, in addition to delineating a role for the Big Dog in the run-up to November, 2016, she needs to define, or redefine, her relationship with a President whom she served for four years but whose low popularity ratings could be a big drag on her own Presidential hopes.

How Hillary deals with Bill and Barack could be her greatest challenge or her greatest opportunity—or perhaps both.

On the face of things, having a popular former President by her side is a great opportunity. After Bill Clinton left the Oval Office, he could be relied upon to rally the Democratic base, especially minorities. Today, his popularity extends to independents and even some Republicans. In the past year or two, his approval rating has consistently been in the mid or high sixties, which means he’s a lot more popular now than he was for most of his two terms in office. His ratings are also a good deal higher than Hillary’s. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey puts her approval rating at just forty-three per cent, which represents a steep fall from her figures a couple of years ago.

Of course, it’s not clear how much of a boost the former President can give his wife. If he plays an active role in her campaign, his image as an elder statesman may be tarnished, in which case his own approval rating would fall. Something like this appears to be what has happened to Hillary. A couple of years back, she was a hardworking Secretary of State, flying all around the world representing the United States and, seemingly, above the daily Washington squabbles. Now many Americans see her as another partisan politician, and her popularity has suffered accordingly.

Bill’s presence should help his wife at least somewhat. According to Jordan Ragusa, a data analyst at the Rule 22 blog, “when Bill’s approval rating increases by 1 unit, Hillary’s approval increases by just under 1/2 in the same direction.” I’m not sure how this finding can be reconciled with the recent sharp decline in Hillary’s numbers. But given the halo that now surrounds the late nineteen-nineties, a period of peace and prosperity, it only makes sense for Hillary’s campaign to remind voters of Bill. One of his adages from 1992 might go over better now than it did back then: when you elect a Clinton, you get “two for the price of one.”

The danger for Hillary’s campaign is that her husband’s presence becomes an unwelcome diversion—a story that some parts of the media are already running with. “It was a preview of coming distractions” was the first line in the New York Times piece about Hillary’s return to Iowa. “As is often the case wherever Mr. Clinton goes, what amounted to the unofficial start of the next Iowa presidential caucuses was as much about the Clinton who already served as president as the one who appears to have designs on the office,” the reporters Jonathan Martin and Amy Chozick continued.

Maybe that’s how it seemed from the press area. But were the ordinary attendees at the steak fry so distracted by the former President that they failed to get Hillary’s message? On Monday, the Web site of the Des Moines Register, which presumably knows its readers pretty well, featured a video of Hillary’s entire speech. The paper’s coverage of Bill’s speech, in which he took a few swings at the Koch brothers and recalled that the 1993 steak fry was so wet it reminded him of Woodstock, focussed on how he had mispronounced Bruce Braley’s name.

For now, at least, a bigger challenge for Hillary than handling Bill Clinton is figuring out how to position herself in relation to Obama. Last month, when she appeared to criticize the President’s non-interventionist stance on Syria, she had to call him and clarify her remarks. In Iowa, by contrast, she went out of her way to ally herself with the domestic policies and economic record of the Obama Administration—a record that has helped earn the President a thirty-seven-per-cent approval rating in the state. Although it didn’t garner many headlines, it was probably the most important and substantive thing to come out of her speech.

Near the beginning, she artfully acknowledged her 2008 defeat in the Iowa caucus by a young senator from Illinois, joking, “I wonder whatever happened to him.” Then, after recounting how she and the President had become colleagues and friends, Hillary bracketed him with the two iconic men with whom she appeared: “And when it comes to moving America forward, we know what it takes,” she said. “We’ve seen it in Tom Harkin. We’ve seen it in Bill Clinton. And we’ve seen it in Barack Obama. Under President Obama’s leadership, out country is on the road to recovery.”

To support this argument, she cited rising exports and falling unemployment, which has seen the jobless rate in Iowa fall to just 4.5 per cent. She mentioned a surge in energy production from renewable sources, and she defended the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature policy initiative, saying that it had generated $1.7 million in refunds for Iowa families. To be sure, she qualified this praise by saying that she and Obama would agree that there is “a lot of work ahead” “Maintaining a middle class life feels like pushing a boulder up hill every day,” she added.

By then, though, Hillary had sent an important political message. While she may still try to put some distance between herself and the President on foreign issues, when it comes to domestic policy she and Obama are as one.

In many ways, of course, that shouldn’t come as a shock. In fighting a deep recession with Keynesian stimulus policies, raising tax rates on the rich, boosting the minimum wage, and seeking to provide health care for all, the Obama Administration was pursuing a mainstream progressive agenda that virtually all Democrats support, and, to a large extent, it has worked as advertised. Moreover, much of this agenda can be traced to the Administration of Bill Clinton. In the case of universal health coverage, the lineage can be traced back to Hillary herself.

No surprises there, then. Still, it was helpful of Hillary, at this early stage, to make things clear: her 2016 campaign will rise or fall on defending the economic record of the past six years.