Hillary’s Stumbling Cakewalk Nothing’s working, so now Clinton has come up with a four-step Beat Bernie strategy. Karl Rove
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-stumbling-cakewalk-1453336267
Last month Mrs. Clinton won all eight of the polls taken in Iowa, beating Bernie by an average of 16 points. But now her edge has fallen to only four points in the Real Clear Politics average for the state. Even that number is bolstered by an outlier, a poll that put her ahead by 21 points; remove it and Mrs. Clinton’s advantage all but disappears. In New Hampshire three polls were taken in December, two of which Mr. Sanders won, putting him ahead by 5.8 points in the Real Clear Politics average. With five fresh polls in January, his average lead has doubled to 11.4 points.
That’s why in Sunday’s Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton deployed a new strategy with four components:
• Attack Mr. Sanders as a socialist. Mrs. Clinton now argues that her opponent would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for his socialist schemes. An unlikely attack dog, daughter Chelsea Clinton, even went so far as to assail Mr. Sanders for supporting single-payer health care—“Medicare for all,” as he described it in the debate. It is strange to see the Democratic front-runner trash another Democratic hopeful for backing the expansion of a health-care entitlement.
• Hug President Obama as tightly as possible . During the debate, Mrs. Clinton frequently invoked Mr. Obama’s name and legacy. She depicted Mr. Sanders’s single-payer plan as an attack on ObamaCare, flipped a question on Wall Street regulation to hit Mr. Sanders for criticizing the president, and even defended Mr. Obama’s widely criticized failure to order military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons.
• Lock up the nomination by locking in African-American and Hispanic support. Sunday’s debate was held in South Carolina, where more than half of Democratic primary voters in 2008 were black. “There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One out of three African-American men may well end up going to prison.”
But the Associated Press suggested that this statistic, based on a projection from 2003, was misleading. A Pew Research Center review in 2013 of data from the Justice Bureau found that during 2010 only about one black man in 25 was incarcerated. Mr. Sanders, in contrast, said that “the vast majority” of policemen are “honest, hardworking people trying to do a difficult job.”
• Create momentum with endorsements from liberal interest groups. The Clinton campaign has rolled out endorsements from the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Planned Parenthood, Naral Pro-Choice America and the Human Rights Campaign. It’s unclear how effective these will be in swaying Democratic primary voters.
Part of Mrs. Clinton’s problem is that she is running on her résumé: She finished her opening statement at the debate by declaring that “we need a president who can do all the aspects” of what she called “the hardest job in the world.” Mr. Sanders is running on his ideology: He concluded by saying that his campaign was “a political revolution to not only elect the president, but to transform this country.” It’s easy to see which theme better motivates hard-left Democrats.
Still, Mrs. Clinton remains the prohibitive Democratic favorite. It’s hard to picture Mr. Sanders winning states that are less liberal than Iowa and New Hampshire. But Mrs. Clinton’s new nomination strategy only compounds her problems in the general election. She is already widely viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy. After first trying to defeat Bernie by running left, she is now trying to beat him by running back to the center. That adds to her reputation for being willing to say and do anything to get elected.
By hugging the president so tightly, Mrs. Clinton has made it more difficult to portray her candidacy as even a modest change, and easier for Republicans to say she would be a third term for Mr. Obama. This ties her fate in November even more strongly to the president’s approval rating (anemic) and public perceptions of America’s direction (lousy).
And with a Clinton, there is always the specter of scandal—in this case, the FBI’s investigation of her private email server and whether her dealings at the State Department with the Clinton Foundation may have violated public corruption laws. That Mrs. Clinton is this vulnerable at this stage of the campaign means that Republicans have a great opportunity to win the White House—if they don’t throw it away.
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the 1896 Election Still Matters” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
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