What Kind of Campaign Will Hillary Run?

     As it's already a fait accompoli-even if that fact offends some people-the question now is what kind of campaign she will run and what policy emphasis will it have. Greg Sargent looks at her announcement to run video as providing some clues. 

     "Hillary Clinton’s video announcement of her presidential run features Americans who are entering transitional periods in their lives — an expecting mother, a pair of immigrant brothers starting a business, a man changing to a new skilled blue-collar job, a woman running for president (Clinton herself). They discuss the future with a mix of trepidation and self-conscious hopefulness. This includes Clinton; by discussing her own story in similarly personal terms,  she seeks to humanize her ambitions and tie them to the ordinary hopes for the future expressed by the “everyday Americans” that precede her in the video."

     "Behind all the sentimentality lies some fairly serious signaling about where Clinton’s campaign is headed and what it will be about."

      "Notably, all the people in the video express cautious optimism about the next chapter in their lives. The key here is the tone. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Clinton’s advisers, after pondering how to handle GOP efforts to link her to Obama, had concluded that her best bet is not to distance herself from Obama’s record, but to praise the economic progress he has made, and promise a “new chapter” designed to build on it, one focused on giving those “everyday Americans” a better shot at getting ahead."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/04/13/what-hillary-clintons-campaign-announcement-video-tells-us/

     I think this is a pretty good ad and I also think they're right to not take the GOP bait and run against Obama as Gore did against her husband back in 2000 for deleterious effect.  We already saw in 2012 that it's a loser for Democrats to vie with the GOP to see who hates Obama more. 

    When you come from an incumbent Administration-as Gore did in 2000 and Hillary, though not the Veep, does this time-to attack it, you also attack your own record. In addition polling seems to show her that this would be the wrong tact. 

    "That’s because internal Clinton polling shows frustration with Washington gridlock but not necessarily a desire for a wholesale break from Obama’s policies. Public polling has shown a desire for such a break, but Clinton’s pollster, Joel Benenson, is known to put much more stock in his own nuanced, fine-grained research."

     "I strongly suspect the Clinton campaign has concluded that Americans are exhausted by the ideological death struggles of the Obama presidency, and that swing voters and independents don’t see the Obama years as quite the smoking apocalyptic hellscape Republicans continue to describe. With the GOP hoping to terrify voters with the prospect of Hillary-as-Obama-third-term, and with the 2016 GOP hopefuls zealously vowing to roll back the Obama presidency, Republicans will likely continue re-litigating how awful the Obama years have supposedly been. The Clinton gamble is that swing voters don’t want to hear this argument anymore; that they agree Obama’s policies have not turned the economy around fast enough, but think this was understandable given the circumstances and don’t see those policies as an utter, abject failure."

     In my previous post, I discussed the tendency to fight the last war. 

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/04/first-thing-to-understand-about-hillary.html

    No doubt, the GOP is going to make this campaign all about the last war. 

    "One of the hallmarks of the Obama era has been that midterm electorates have been dominated by voters who agree with the smoking-hellscape portrayal of his presidency, while presidential year electorates have not. Thus, after the 2010 rout, Republicans were shocked to discover, a mere two years later, that their core assumption about Obama’s first term — there was no way he could get reelected, given how much of a disaster he had proved — was deeply flawed. My guess is the Clinton team believes Republicans, flush from their epic 2014 victory, will again over-read public disapproval of Obama and will mistakenly premise their strategy too heavily on the notion that the public agrees the Obama presidency was a disaster. And as Jonathan Chait notes, there is a decent chance the economy will continue to expand; that the desire for change will not prove as potent as Republicans expect; and that national demographics will continue to favor Democrats."

    "The Clinton gamble is that swing voters won’t necessarily be seduced by the GOP promise of dramatic change, particularly after hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent defining that change through a contrast of the GOP nominee’s agenda with her own. Just as happened in 2012."

     P.S. More on her rollout and the contrast between her 2008 and 2016 campaign:

    "Clinton, who begins the 2016 presidential race as the commanding Democratic front runner, entered the fray with a flurry of video, email and social media announcements that indicated she had absorbed some of the lessons of her painful 2008 loss and would not take anything for granted this time."

    "When she lost the Democratic nominating battle to Barack Obama, her campaign was heavily criticized for conveying a sense of arrogance and entitlement, and for being out of touch with the party's progressive wing."

    "This time, the video launching her campaign portrayed her as a warmer, more empathetic figure and laid the groundwork for a more populist economic agenda."

     "Eight years ago, her launch message was "I'm in it to win." On Sunday, she shifted the attention to voters, declaring on her new website, "Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion."

     http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/12/us-usa-election-clinton-idUSKBN0N305B20150412

     Sounds like she's getting it.