While reading some campaign advice from David Axelrod directed at Hillary Clinton's campaign for President, my first reaction was a wild whoop of incredulous laughter. My laughter turned to consternation in short order however once I had a fuller understanding of the challenges that will face Hillary Clinton in a General Election
To make sense of this diary it's necessary to first have an understanding of David Axelrod's political theory of Replica vs. Remedy, explored in his recent book Believer which Slate did a good job of explaining:
Axelrod writes about a crucial lesson he learned from working on so many mayoral races. Voters want a “remedy, not [a] replica” in the next candidate, even when the incumbent leaving office is well-liked. He says this rule—which he learned most directly in the 1989 race for the mayor of Cleveland where Michael White, the Democrat, followed the popular incumbent Republican George Voinovich—applies to presidential campaigns, too. He wrote to Sen. Obama in 2008: “When incumbents step down, voters rarely opt for a replica of what they have, even when that outgoing leader is popular. They almost always choose change over the status quo.” This is a different formulation of what President Obama was talking about recently when he said voters wanted “that new car smell.” Clinton is associated with the status quo even more because she has the Obama years and the Clinton years attached to her.
If we accept Axelrod's premise, Replica vs Remedy will be the subconscious frame of the next Presidential election. Because we are coming off of two terms of a Democratic Presidency, Republicans will try to frame Hillary Clinton as the Third Term of an Obama Presidency, i.e. Replica.
"What she can't rely on, and I don't think she will, is the Clinton name, although the Clinton name trades very high in American politics," Axelrod told Capital Download in an interview at his office at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. "Americans are always about the future. Bill Clinton was famously the one who said that, and he was right. So she needs a very well-conceived message about where she wants to lead the country. If she doesn't have that, then it does become a problem. ....
"I think she has to approach this campaign like a challenger, not like a front-runner — like an insurgent."
Axelrod: Hillary has to run like an insurgent
That is why I laughed initially when I read Axelrod's advice to Hillary to not trade on the Clinton name and legacy. I said to myself "Whoa! David Axelrod is being Rumpelstiltskin and telling Hillary to turn a roomful of gold into straw."
To me, telling Hillary to separate herself from Bill and the Clinton legacy and what they view as their accomplishments and achievements is like telling McDonalds to lose the hamburgers. Hillary Clinton is running on her history, her experience, her resume and her accomplishments, plus it is highly doubtful that Bill will accept a seat at the rear of the bus, since history tells us differently.
Hillary being able to transform herself into an insurgent has the likelihood of as much success as Julie Andrews playing a heroin addict – it’s against type and most simply won’t buy it. Plus, it would require acting chops that Hillary simply doesn’t appear to have, witness the so far unsuccessful attempts to speak “Populist”.
Interestingly enough, in the very same article Axelrod contradicts his advice for Hillary to be insurgent and forget her past by saying that people will view her as a “remedy” for gridlock because
"people are going to be looking, as they always do, not for the replica but for the remedy. They're going to want someone who knows how to manage the system, navigate the system, and I think her skill set and her background are probably better for this campaign than they were for the last."
I'm confused - I thought Axelrod told her to nix references to her skill set and background as being reminders that she is "Replica" yet here he is re-defining it as remedy. I now have this image of Hillary re-enacting Faye Dunaway in Chinatown – “I’m the Remedy!” “I’m the Replica!” “I’m the Replica and the Remedy!”
Attempting to make sense of Axelrod's advice, I guess Hillary has to market herself as the Insurgent Insider. Good luck with that. It's an oxymoron.
But even though I am somewhat making fun of Axelrod's "frenemy" counseling to the Clinton campaign, he has touched on a really really big problem for Hillary in the General Election and it does revolve around what he defines as the Replica/Remedy choice.
Please join below for the details.
I read this rather interesting article from the National Journal
Think Hillary Clinton is likely to win? Think again.
Ask around: Washington is pretty certain Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win the White House. Democrats have a natural turnout advantage in presidential years, seasoned political operatives reason. Five of the past six popular-vote tallies have gone to the Democratic candidate. And early polls that show Clinton sporting a big lead, especially among women, have strategists wondering how the Republican nominee could ever catch up.
But outside of the capital, from Georgia to New York to California, there's another set of political professionals watching this race: academics and model-makers. And based on the data they track, Democrats have little reason to be so bullish about Clinton's chances.
This article showcase a number of academic studies which show that Hillary’s support may be wide but shallow, mostly due to circumstances outside of her control that have more to do with how the public has behaved and voted historically after two terms of the same Party in the President’s seat. In reading between the lines of the studies one can see how the dilemma reflects directly back to the Replica/Remedy dichotomy already defined by Axelrod.
In some ways Hillary is screwed in both directions – If she embraces the Obama administration she is seen as a replica that is basically “Obama’s third term” which does not fulfill the public’s innate desire for change and if she rejects the past and cast herself as “remedy” or “change” she will be put in the same uncomfortable position as many Democrats faced unsuccessfully in the last elections where rejection of their own party led to their own rejection at the polls. We all remember that, right? When Allison Grimes couldn’t bring herself to admit that she voted for President Obama?
Hillary is going to have to be a lot more skillful in threading a needle requiring her to be both gracious in accepting the Democratic mantle while at the same time not throwing the mantle on the ground and stomping all over it.
This almost insolvable quandary of presentation, let’s call it Axelrod’s Kobayashi Maru
is further elaborated on here in the articlein Slate which posits that HRC’s only answer is
Perhaps this is one of the reasons Clinton is working so hard to come up with a message that is so unique and powerful it looks new. Amy Chozick of the New York Times reports that Clinton has consulted more than 200 experts in her effort to craft an economic message. She’s not just trying to come up with a policy that creates distance, but one that achieves escape velocity.
Hillary’s possible future success lies in whether she has the guts to go big enough in her policies and agenda to overcome the moniker of "Obama’s Third Term" and enough to separate her out as actual positive economic change from the incremental policies of the past. I personally question whether she has it in her and I attribute those feelings to seeing that she continues to align herself with proven failed economic policy wonks like Larry Summers and from reading that her team rejects the possibility of a financial transaction tax, something that already has mainstream Dem acceptance.
If Hillary isn’t going to go big and if she sails into a general without an opportunity to present herself as the alternative to anyone significant or compelling in a primary, then it is possible that she will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory despite her dominance in the polls of today.