Kerry Murphy Clinton?

There are lots of long newspaper stories today on how Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, including a good analysis by Susan Milligan in the Boston Globe (subhead: "Campaign wasted momentum, money, analysts say") that ends with this extraordinary quote by Steve Rabinowitz ("a veteran of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign who was sympathetic to Hillary Clinton's candidacy"):

"I couldn't help thinking about the irony that she had become the establishment candidate. All kinds of women of her generation still can't believe it."

It seems hard to believe that it's hard to believe that the wife of an ex-president could be the establishment candidate. (Who's better qualified?) She could have been the insurgent candidate if there had been a military coup in the United States and the resistance had chosen, for partly symbolic reasons, to rally around the wife of a democratically elected president, but I can't think of too many other situations in which Clinton could have been "anti-establishment." (Maybe if she had divorced Bill and then run as a Republican...)

One point I haven't seen in the post-mortems is that Clinton never gave a succinct description of how her administration would differ from the previous Democratic administration -- that is, her husband's. There was some muddled rhetoric about how she wouldn't have signed the NAFTA treaty as written, but I don't recall her talking much about how she would change any of the priorities or policy directions of the first Clinton administration. Would she have spent more on infrastructure and social services than Bill did, as opposed to running up budget surpluses that could then be turned into tax cuts by the next Republican president? Would she pay more attention to environmental issues than Bill did? Would she follow his lead on expanding the War on Drugs now that terrorism is more of a concern?

It's not at all unusual to signal that you would have different goals than a predecessor from the same party. George H.W. Bush did it by promising a "kinder, gentler" administration -- the implicit point of comparison being Ronald Reagan's "government is the problem" regime. The point wasn't to trash Reagan but to assure voters that he was independent and forward-looking.

Coincidentally or not, this was also something that the first serious female candidate for governor of Massachusetts failed to do in 2006. Kerry Murphy Healey seemed determined not to say anything at all negative about Mitt Romney, the fellow Republican who had picked her as a running mate in 2002 and was now leaving the governor's office. By that point, Romney was seen as detached from the state, a disappointment in terms of his promises to boost economic development, and out of sync with the state on cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But Healey never explained how her administration would be different. Instead, she focused her TV commercials and debate performances on how much of a risk it would be to elect the charismatic but arguably less policy-oriented Deval Patrick -- who happened to be the first black gubernatorial nominee from a major party.

 

Comments

[Chris VanHaight]

I believe that the turning point for Hillary was in late Fall, when she kicked into high gear the "I was my husband's co-president" schtick. People wanted to vote for something new, but she seemed to be running on the past. I also wonder how much the helicopter incident in Iowa hurt her there, when instead of traveling around the state in a bus like every other candidate, she decided to swoop down from the skies so she could save time and "meet more Iowans."

[Robert David Sullivan]

"Swoop down from the skies"? You're not using Wicked Witch imagery there, I hope.