Hillary Rodham entered Wellesley College, in the fall of 1965, as a Goldwater Girl, and left it, in the spring of 1969, as an admirer of the community organizer Saul Alinsky. Today, the story of a young person from Middle America moving to the left while at an élite college is familiar, and back then it was probably even more nearly universal. But it’s also interesting to think about what was going on in the wider political world while Hillary was an undergraduate.
After Lyndon Johnson obliterated Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election, lots of people assumed that American conservatism was dead—including, who knows, maybe a seventeen-year-old Hillary herself. Then came the 1966 midterm elections, when, riding the “white backlash” against events like the 1965 Watts riots, in Los Angeles, the Republicans made big gains in Congress. In 1968, they took back the White House, in an election that looked closer than it was because a conservative third-party candidate, George Wallace, had siphoned off 13.5 per cent of the vote from Richard Nixon. By the time that Hillary made her celebrated Wellesley commencement speech, endorsing the student protests of the age in a measured, campus-leader tone, she had to have registered that the country was moving in the opposite direction.
Hillary Clinton is the least instinctive of politicians; you can almost see her thinking her way through a situation. The master situation for her, from the time of her political awakening through her early sixties, when she first ran for President, was the difficulty of winning in American politics as a liberal. This may help explain her much-disputed decision to bring in Mark Penn, who made his early reputation by figuring out how to achieve Democratic victories in a Republican era, as her chief strategist in the 2008 campaign. Clinton was obviously not looking for a strategist who could help her connect with voters on the left. If you were writing fiction, it would be too heavily ironic to deal her the fate of being defeated by someone who felt less constrained about owning up to a youthful admiration for Alinsky.
In the early phases of the 2016 campaign, there is no form of high-end political expertise that Clinton doesn’t have at her disposal—including much of the leadership of the campaign staff that defeated her in 2008. One can only imagine the polls, the focus groups, and the staff retreats that underlay her runic two-minute announcement video—a high-gloss little movie that was devoted to “everyday Americans,” included a bit of rhetoric about the deck being stacked against them, and hardly showed the candidate herself. The clear message was that Clinton has gone from decades of being spooked by the right to, now, being spooked by the left. The video had none of the old, formerly magical symbolic touchpoints of baby-boom liberal politicians who wanted to win: there was no mention of tax cuts, crime-fighting, militarism, or religion, and there were hardly any white males. The only arguably centrist notes struck were a couple of glowing mentions of small business and a very veiled possible reference to charter schools.
The United States is a big country with a miraculously durable two-party system, which means that each party has to be an unnatural coalition of disparate elements. The Republicans won their big battle of the late twentieth century, which took up most of Hillary Clinton’s adult life, to persuade social conservatives to leave the Democratic Party. But in the process they drove many who were more socially liberal away. And, because the political system is in constant flux, even as the Democratic and Republican parties have become more efficiently liberal and conservative, generating the hyper-partisanship that everyone claims to despise, each has begun to show a new set of internal strains. The Republicans have to try to unite affluent economic conservatives with financially struggling evangelicals. The Democratic Party that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made, and that Hillary Clinton now inherits, encompasses minorities, labor unions, and single women, plus significant portions of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the broad professional upper-middle class in big metropolitan areas, especially on the coasts. (The historic home of the Bush family, Greenwich, Connecticut, is now represented in Congress by a Democrat.) The Democrats’ diversity enables them to achieve rough financial parity with the Republicans, but it has to be tricky to manage.
The announcement video indicates that the Clinton campaign believes that in this cycle, the core appeal to Democratic and potentially Democratic voters has to be based on economics. Voters want to hear that the generation-long stall-out of the American working and middle classes’ fortunes is somehow going to end. The problem is that, right now, the Democratic coalition seems to be in agreement on the formerly radioactive social issues—ethnicity, sexuality, values—but not on the economic issues that will define the election. In the video you can detect the hope that it will be possible to declare that the campaign is all about economics, and then to spend it talking mainly about other things. Does Hillary Clinton want to raise taxes on the rich? More heavily regulate financial institutions? Make unions more politically powerful? Throw some sand in the gears of globalization by restricting free trade? These are the kinds of questions that have historically gone along with an overriding concern with the welfare of “everyday Americans,” but they are not pleasant ones for the campaign, because in each case, a clear answer would alienate an element of the Democratic Party.
Don’t think of this problem as being only about Clinton’s keeping the Elizabeth Warren wing of her party on board through the nomination. Last week, John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who’s thinking of jumping into the Presidential race, made a point of going on national television and complaining at some length about “greed” on Wall Street. That indicates that he thinks there may be a way to run against both Clinton and Jeb Bush on what might be called Main Street economics, from within the Republican Party. Exactly what to say about the tough economic situation faced by most Americans could be as tricky for Clinton in the general election as it will be in the primary season. Her policy team is no doubt as well stocked as her message team, and it may have the tougher job.
