In 1992, then Democratic Governor Bill Clinton’s winning campaign for President was epitomized by his forward-looking campaign song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” In 2008, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s campaign song for Ms. Clinton’s troubled campaign seems to be “Don’t Stop Thinking About Yesterday.”
The most striking aspect of what is now unfolded in Iowa and in New Hampshire is this: suddenly, the Clintons are looking oh, so 20th century not so much in a physical sense, but in attitudinal terms. They seem stuck in a time tunnel and are asking the nation to enter it with them.
There is less talk about building a bridge to the 22nd century than of the bridges built to or still on the drawing boards to the 21st century.
Their argument about experience seems to have an unappealing, underlying “Hey, let’s pick up just where we left off when we left the White House!” — and it seems less that Americans’ aren’t buying it, and more that Americans want to move on to a fresh approach.
The Clintons are passionate political warriors and, in the end, Hillary Clinton could still win the nomination — but lose election or win the election and essentially be antiquated and politically hamstrung by the time she puts her hand on the Bible.
This is not unusual in history. There have been MANY instances where there have been significant shifts where it took time for some folks to notice and the failures to adapt meant consequences:
–Movies and radio supplanted vaudeville in the early 20th century, but it took vaudeville theaters a while to totally vanish.
–Movies went to sound but it took a while for some silent stars to see the writing on the wall. (Charles Chaplin had enough star power to continue making silents until 1939).
–Television debuted and caught on like wildfire. Some movie studios balked at getting involved until it was clear the handwriting was on the wall and they entered into TV production. Radio stubbornly sputtered on during the early TV era but finally died out and adapted to other formats so AM radio endured.
–Evening newspapers failed to adapt to the advent of the highly popular evening television newscast. Many of them suffered and few evening newspapers exist in the U.S. today.
–Richard Nixon didn’t foresee the impact of televised debates and the importance of imagery. He “lost” the debates with JFK (which some think he won on radio) partially due to being sick and lousy makeup.
–Newspapers failed to realize the impact of the supermarket tabloids’ growing popularity and reporting so they reacted to it by adapting some of the tabloid techniques and values. But then came the INTERNET where some media types pooh-poohed its long term impact or dismissed weblogs (such as this) as mere chatrooms that would NEVER influence how they operated. Newspapers have lost young readers IN DROVES due to this error. (Find a young person. How many can YOU find who read newspapers these days?)
So now you have the Clintons giving out vibes that just as the Bush family wanted a restoration of Bush Family governance, with the Clinton years as some kind of rude interruption, they want to get America back to the 1990s before the Bushes came in and interrupted what they were doing.
But saying words don’t matter and raise false hopes won’t negate the vibes.
And it is NOT true that words don’t matter.
If that was true, then India’s Mahatma Gandhi, JFK, RFK and Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. would have been irrelevant.
If that was true, then Ronald Reagan never would have gotten off the Republican rubber chicken circuit and become one of California’s most fondly-remembered governors or made it to the White House.
Other see this huge, ongoing Clinton error now as well. Democratic political consultant Bob Shrum (who had an awful record in recent years with Presidential clients who hired him, whom we’ve poked fun at and often blasted on this site but who wrote a SUPERB BOOK) is increasingly outspoken and he writes this in the New York Daily News:
If (although I strongly suspect the right word is “when”) Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow’s New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be “shaken up” or “relaunched.” Scapegoats will be found and exiled: Mark Penn, the pollster and strategist, foremost among them. After all, the candidate can’t very well dispense with the überstrategist who also happens to be her husband and who was fully complicit in designing and driving her message.
The flaw wasn’t just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that the Clintons picked the wrong year in that decade. Instead of 1992, when Bill was the personification of change, their model was 1996. So Hillary ran as a pseudo-incumbent, with a selection of bite-size proposals and an abundance of caution and transparent calculation.
Why would any campaign ever explicitly announce a tour to make the candidate “likable”?
Or, as happened when the beleaguered Clinton machine sputtered into New Hampshire, that they now had a plan for her to be spontaneous and actually answer audience questions?The Clinton industry, encrusted with the beneficiaries and acolytes of the first and probably only Clinton presidency, has turned Hillary into a product whose sell-by date has passed. In a year of change, she has been positioned as the establishment candidate. The relentless appeal to “experience” reinforces that – and too often elides into a dubious attempt to take credit for some of Bill’s accomplishments.
And then he hits the nail on the head:
More fundamentally, Hillary seems to be making an argument about herself, not the future or the voters. No wonder she is losing to a young senator who comes across as the leader of a revolution in our politics.
There could still be a Clinton miracle, but by tomorrow night she is more likely to be the KOd Kid than the Comeback Kid.
He calls Clinton’s focus a “massive mistake” with a possible fix just letting Hillary be Hillary.
So it’s a long shot, with one and only one possible road to recovery: Let Hillary be Hillary. Throw away the product packaging – those poll-tested small-bites of policy – and set out a big case about what she wants to do in the next four years, not what she has done for the past 35.
The pursuit of the presidency is not a résumé contest. Otherwise a one-term congressman named Lincoln never would have beaten Stephen Douglas, “the little giant” of American politics; Kennedy never would have prevailed against Nixon, and the young Bill Clinton never would have ousted the first George Bush from the White House.
And, indeed, the news reports also have some tidbits that underscore Obamamania that is unlikely to be defused by reading a resume or standing next to a former President.
Fire marshals from Manchester south to Salem and east to Exeter had to shut the doors to each of Obama’s five rallies on Sunday, as crowds flocked to see the Illinois senator who took a step last week toward becoming the first black president with a decisive win in the Iowa caucuses.
On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times reports that Hillary Clinton was drawing good crowds, too, “large and buoyant crowds at rallies in Nashua (about 3,700 people) and Hampton (close to 1,600). In both locations, overflow rooms were used at local high schools to accommodate people who couldn’t get in.”
But then there’s THIS report — truly a shocker:
DURHAM, N.H. — Is this what it would have been like had Elvis been reduced to playing Reno?
Former President Bill Clinton has been drawing sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds at big venues in the state that revived his presidential campaign in 1992. He entered to polite applause and rows of empty seats at the University of New Hampshire on Friday. Several people filed out midspeech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause. He talked about his administration, his foundation work and some about his wife.
Did you ever think you’d read a piece like this about Bill Clinton?
Does this sound like a campaign that is connecting — or a former President who is an asset on the campaign trail?
“Hillary’s got good plans,” Mr. Clinton kept saying as he worked through a hoarse-voiced litany of why his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is a “world-class change agent.” He urged his audience to “caucus” on Tuesday for Mrs. Clinton, before correcting himself (“vote”). He took questions, quickly worked a rope line and left.
Maybe the sluggish day was a blip. It was, in fairness, the day after Mrs. Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses, behind Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards of North Carolina. Mr. Clinton was working on 30 minutes’ sleep. He traveled to New Hampshire from Iowa in the wee hours, and the university was on winter break.
But there was a similarly listless aura at the previous stop, in Rochester. And again, on Saturday in Bow, at just the sort of high school gym that the master campaigner used to blow out. Only about 225 showed up in Bow — about one-third the capacity of the room — to hear Mr. Clinton hit his bullet points on the subprime lending crisis, $100 barrels of oil and how “10 of Hillary’s fellow senators have endorsed her.”
“The crowd seemed very passive,” Arthur Cunningham of Bow said after the speech. “Maybe they were tired.”
Who knows how this will end?
Hillary could wind up being sworn in as President.
But unless she tosses out her new unofficial theme song, she’d be to the trend we see now emerging in 21st century politics to politics what a new evening newspaper would be to newspapers.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.