Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:38:19 -0700
Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?
By FRANK RICH
THE Democrats can't lose the White House in 2008, can they?
Some 13 months before Election Day, the race's dynamic seems
immutable. Americans can't wait to evict the unpopular president and
end his disastrous war. As the campaign's poll-tested phrasemaking
constantly reminds us, voters crave change above all else. That means
nearly any Democrat might do, even if the nominee isn't the first
woman, black or Hispanic to lead a major party's ticket.
The Republican field of aging white guys, meanwhile, gets flakier by
the day. The front-runner has taken to cooing to his third wife over a
cellphone in the middle of campaign speeches. His hottest challenger,
the new "new Reagan," may have learned his lines for "Law & Order,"
but clearly needs cue cards on the stump. In Florida, even the most
rudimentary details of red-hot local issues (drilling in the
Everglades, Terri Schiavo) eluded him. The party's fund-raising is
anemic. Its snubs of Hispanic and African-American voters kissed off
essential swing states in the Sun Belt and moderate swing voters
farther north.
So nothing can go wrong for the Democrats. Can it?
Of course it can, and not just because of the party's perennial
penchant for cutting off its nose to spite its face. (Witness the
Democratic National Committee's zeal in shutting down primary
campaigning in Florida because the state moved up the primary's date.)
The biggest indicator of potential trouble ahead is that the already-
codified Beltway narrative for the race so favors the Democrats. Given
the track record of Washington's conventional wisdom, that's not good
news. These are the same political pros who predicted that scandal
would force an early end to the Clinton presidency and that "Mission
Accomplished" augured victory in Iraq and long-lasting Republican
rule.
The Beltway's narrative has it not only that the Democrats are shoo-
ins, but also that the likely standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton, is
running what Zagat shorthand might describe as a "flawless campaign"
that is "tightly disciplined" and "doesn't make mistakes." This
scenario was made official last weekend, when Senator Clinton appeared
on all five major Sunday morning talk shows - a publicity coup, as it
unfortunately happens, that is known as a "full Ginsburg" because it
was first achieved by William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, in
1998.
Mrs. Clinton was in complete control. Forsaking TV studios for a
perfectly lighted set at her home in Chappaqua, she came off like a
sitting head of state. The punditocracy raved. We are repeatedly told
that with Barack Obama still trailing by double digits in most polls,
the only way Mrs. Clinton could lose her tight hold on the nomination
and, presumably, the White House would be if she were bruised in Iowa
(where both John Edwards and Senator Obama remain competitive) or
derailed by unforeseeable events like a scandal or a domestic terror
attack.
If you buy into the Washington logic that a flawless campaign is one
that doesn't make gaffes, never goes off-message and never makes news,
then this analysis makes sense. The Clinton machine runs as smoothly
and efficiently as a Rolls. And like a fine car, it is just as likely
to lull its driver into complacent coasting and its passengers to
sleep. What I saw on television last Sunday was the incipient second
coming of the can't-miss 2000 campaign of Al Gore.
That Mr. Gore, some may recall, was not the firebrand who emerged from
defeat, speaking up early against the Iraq war and leading the
international charge on global warming. It was instead the cautious
Gore whose public persona changed from debate to debate and whose
answers were often long-winded and equivocal (even about the Kansas
Board of Education's decision to ban the teaching of evolution).
Incredibly, he minimized both his environmental passions and his own
administration's achievements throughout the campaign.
He, too, had initially been deemed a winner, the potential recipient
of a landslide rather than a narrow popular-vote majority. The signs
were nearly as good for Democrats then as they are now. The
impeachment crusade had backfired on the Republicans in the 1998
midterms; the economy was booming; Mr. Gore's opponent was seen as a
lightweight who couldn't match him in articulateness or his mastery of
policy, let alone his eight years of Clinton White House experience.
Mrs. Clinton wouldn't repeat Mr. Gore's foolhardy mistake of running
away from her popular husband and his record, even if she could. But
almost every answer she gave last Sunday was a rambling and often
tedious Gore-like filibuster. Like the former vice president, she
often came across as a pontificator and an automaton - in contrast to
the personable and humorous person she is known to be off-camera. And
she seemed especially evasive when dealing with questions requiring
human reflection instead of wonkery.
Reiterating that Mrs. Clinton had more firsthand White House
experience than any other candidate, George Stephanopoulous asked her
to name "something that you don't know that only a president can
know." That's hardly a tough or trick question, but rather than
concede she isn't all-knowing or depart from her script, the senator
deflected it with another mini-speech.
Then there was that laugh. The Clinton campaign's method for heeding
the perennial complaints that its candidate comes across as too
calculating and controlled is to periodically toss in a smidgen of
what it deems personality. But these touches of intimacy seem even
more calculating: the "Let's chat" campaign rollout, the ostensibly
freewheeling but tightly controlled Web "conversations," the supposed
vox populi referendum to choose a campaign song (which yielded a plain-
vanilla Celine Dion clunker).
Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an
alarm clock buzzer. Mocking this tic last week, "The Daily Show"
imagined a robotic voice inside the candidate's head saying, "Humorous
remark detected - prepare for laughter display." However sincere, this
humanizing touch seems as clumsily stage-managed as the Gores'
dramatic convention kiss.
None of this would matter if the only issue were Mrs. Clinton's
ability as a performer. Not every president can be Reagan or J.F.K.
or, for that matter, Bill Clinton. But in her case, as in Mr. Gore's
in 2000, the performance too often dovetails with the biggest question
about her as a leader: Is she so eager to be all things to all people,
so reluctant to offend anyone, that we never will learn what she
really thinks or how she will really act as president?
So far her post-first-lady record suggests a follower rather than a
leader. She still can't offer a credible explanation of why she gave
President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq (or why she voted
against the Levin amendment that would have put on some diplomatic
brakes). That's because her votes had more to do with hedging her
political bets than with principle. Nor has she explained why it took
her two years of the war going south to start speaking up against it.
She was similarly tardy with her new health care plan, waiting to see
what heat Mr. Edwards and Senator Obama took with theirs. She has
lagged behind the Democratic curve on issues ranging from the profound
(calling for an unequivocal ban on torture) to the trivial
(formulating a response to the MoveOn.org Petraeus ad).
As was proved again in Wednesday night's debate, her opponents have
not yet figured out how to seriously challenge her. Now the story line
of her inevitable triumph is gathering force. At the same time, her
campaign works relentlessly to shut down legitimate journalistic
vetting of her record. In the latest example, Politico.com reported
last week on the murky backstage machinations by the Clinton camp
before the magazine GQ killed an article by Joshua Green, whose 2006
Atlantic Monthly profile judged Mrs. Clinton a practitioner of
"systematic caution" with "no big ideas." The donors' list and first
lady archives at the Clinton presidential library remain far from
transparent.
Senator Clinton may well be the Democrats' most accomplished would-be
president. But we won't know for certain until she's tested by events
she can't control. Had Bill Bradley roughed up Mr. Gore in 2000, it
might have jolted him into running a smarter race against George W.
Bush.
In this context it's worth noting that Mr. Bush's desperate lame-duck
campaign to brand himself as a reincarnation of Harry Truman is not
100 percent ludicrous. A tiny part of the analogy could yet pan out.
In 1948, Washington's commentators and pollsters were convinced that
Americans, tired of 15 years of Democratic rule, would vote in a
Republican. Like today's G.O.P., the Democrats back then were saddled
with both an unloved incumbent president and open divisions in the
party's ranks on both its left and right flanks. Surely, the thinking
went, the beleaguered Democrats couldn't possibly vanquish a
presidential candidate from New York known for his experience,
competence, uncontroversial stands and above-the-fray demeanor.
You don't want to push historical analogies too far, but it's hard not
to add that the campaign slogan of that sure winner, Thomas Dewey, had
a certain 2008 ring to it: "It's time for a change."
.
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