In Classic Clintonian Fashion, Dems Insult Their Own Voters
Say this for the Democrats in the Clinton era: they’re never boring.
From brilliant responses to sex scandals to impossible smoke-but-not-inhale policy hedges to calculated collapses on everything from gay rights to financial deregulation, the Clinton Dems over the years have proven themselves masters of messaging and political survival.
They’ve turned the act of choosing winning over principle into an art form.
The latest trick? Insulting their own voters at the start of a race. It would be unbelievable, if they hadn’t spent decades preparing us to believe it.
The background for the latest chutzpah-rich gambit has been an alarming slide in Hillary Clinton’s recent polling numbers. A series of different surveys have all shown that in the wake of her email scandal and revelations about the Clinton Foundation, Hillary’s negatives have jumped, and her positives are way down.
“Less than 50 percent of respondents” have favorable feelings about the candidate, as Michael Barone at Real Clear Politics put it.
In response, the Clinton campaign is launching a campaign to fire up the liberal base. They’re going to accomplish this, they say, by having Hillary adopt “polarizing” positions she doesn’t actually believe in. This comes via a trial balloon the campaign itself floated in The New York Times over the weekend.
In “Hillary Clinton Traces Friendly Path, Troubling Party,” Clinton aides reveal to reporters Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman that Hillary is being forced to abandon her preferred political path – as they breathlessly describe it, “the nationwide electoral strategy that won her husband two terms in the White House and brought white working-class voters and great stretches of what is now red-state America back to Democrats.”
They go on:
“Instead, she is poised to retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency: a campaign focused more on mobilizing supporters… than on persuading undecided voters.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides say it is the only way to win in an era of heightened polarization… Her liberal policy positions, they say, will fire up Democrats, a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory — even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her.”
The first thing that jumps out about this story is that it comes directly from the Clinton campaign.
The main sources on the news part of the piece are unnamed “Mrs. Clinton’s aides.” The quotes in the analysis portion, meanwhile, come mainly from a list of current and former Democratic operatives like David Plouffe, Dan Pfeiffer and Robby Mook.
So this wasn’t leaked out to the Times by accident. It was spoon-fed to the paper by the party, which put this “left turn” out there to see how it plays.