Meanwhile, over at The Week, I’ve been offering Hillary Clinton some free campaign advice in a series of columns.
In the first column, which you can read here, I focus on the need for Clinton to redefine herself yet again:
On balance, Clinton has the odds in her favor — but nothing is assured. If there’s one thing the Clinton camp surely learned from watching the GOP primaries, it’s that sitting back and waiting for Trump’s inevitable implosion is a good way to lose to him. But if there’s a second thing they surely learned, it’s that running a campaign focused on pointing out the many ways in which Trump transgresses the acceptable bounds of discourse is… a good way to lose to him. And so far, those are the main tacks that Clinton has taken — which is precisely why some of the more politically astute observers are getting nervous.
Clinton should win. But Clinton could lose. So what does she need to do to turn “should” into “will?” . . .
[I]f Clinton can’t be sure to win by sitting on a lead, or by ruling Trump out of order, then she needs to seize the initiative. That means getting the public to pay attention to her, which requires them to believe they will hear something new. But one of Clinton’s problems is that she’s already well-known, and well-known for repeatedly — and unconvincingly — reinventing herself.
And I conclude that the only way to get the country’s attention is by showing that she’s human – which, in Clinton’s case, means showing that she bleeds like the rest of us.
Clinton’s clenched-teeth determination never to show weakness has left her in a place where the only thing that humanizes her is showing her pain and vulnerability. The side voters need to see is the side that gets hurt. It’s the side that gets disrespected, mocked, and — yes — cheated on. That’s the Clinton who voters just might listen to, because they would know, then, that they are hearing from the real her — and they would know, as well, that it was costing her something to tell them whatever she had to say, so she must really want them to hear it.
And that’s the point of showing vulnerability — not to elicit sympathy or a protective impulse, but to get voters to pay attention to her at all. Right now, the biggest risk for Clinton is that nobody is listening. They’re tuning her out, like a teenager tunes out his mother when she tells him to clean up his pigsty of a room. She needs to get the voters in a frame of mind where they are willing to listen. Then she can deliver a message that might persuade.
I don’t think this is generally true of successful female politicians. Margaret Thatcher did not win by showing her vulnerability. But Hillary Clinton isn’t Margaret Thatcher — and, as noted, she has to stop wishing she were a person other than the one she is. In political terms, she’s Coriolanus. She’s seen as haughty, superior, condescending; of acting like she is owed the presidency, like it’s her turn and we should be thankful to have her. She needs to show her wounds, the wounds she received fighting for us, even when we didn’t appreciate it.
Unfortunately, unlike Coriolanus, Clinton can’t just waltz into the marketplace and say, “I have some wounds upon me, and they smart to hear themselves remember’d.” She’ll have to be subtler than that.
Before getting into how she might subtly do that, I wrote another column, which can be found here, going through some of Clinton’s likely objections to such a strategy.
For example:
[S]houldn’t I focus on defining Donald Trump? He’s the new flavor — and most people don’t realize how terrible he is.
Well, let’s consider how that strategy could backfire if deployed in isolation. Let’s say you run a campaign focused on the bigotry of some of Trump’s core supporters, and on the bigoted things Trump himself has said on many occasions. That might well motivate those voters, but Trump’s response — “Hey, I’m not a racist! I’m friends with Mike Tyson; I hired Lynn Patton! You’re just attacking me because I’m not politically correct!” — might motivate his core demographic equally well, depending on which candidate is viewed as more honest.
Moreover, your attacks actually feed Trump’s counter-attack (“you’re attacking me because I’m politically incorrect!”). So the back and forth could wind up building up his narrative, and his appeal, more than yours. You risk defining yourself as the candidate primarily concerned about proper speech and decorum, while Trump defines himself as someone with no time for such niceties because he’s too busy working to make America great again.
I am not arguing that you shouldn’t attack Trump. But you need to think a step or two down the road. If people don’t trust you, then Trump will be in a good position to deflect the actual substance of your attacks, and make the fact that you’re attacking him the real issue. You need to win your audience’s trust first.
Or, for another example:
Who wants to back someone vulnerable and weak?Women support women who roar!
Oh, yes, definitely. You should keep reminding them that you’re a woman, making history, in the face of unfair attacks from men. You should remind them that you are strongly pro-choice and favor a broad interpretation of Title IX. You should stand with Gloria Steinem and Lena Dunham, and you should all sing Helen Reddy together. Right?
Let me make a suggestion. Have Huma put up a picture of Marcia Clark on the inside of the door to your Brooklyn office, to serve as a constant reminder of how to lose a sure thing by misreading your audience. Clark, as you no doubt recall, was the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. She thought she had a slam-dunk case and a jury eager to hear it, having stacked it with women who she figured would sympathize with the victim. She failed to account for the possibility that, as African-American women, they might have split sympathies — and that the more she painted Simpson as a cold-blooded killer, and the more she harped on the innocence of his white ex-wife, the more she was pushing their sympathies in the wrong direction, toward standing up for one of their men against a white woman’s defamation.
The 2016 election could present you with a similar problem — even without the explicit racial polarities. Say you focus your energy on attacking Trump and his supporters for being misogynists. You’ll have plenty of fuel for such an attack — but how will the women whose husbands are interested in Trump react? Are they going to let you get between them and their husbands? Or are they going to rally to their defense, and against this insulting, elitist outsider?
To get inside that defense, you can’t rely on female solidarity, or on women’s issues.
The third column should be coming next week. In the meantime, you can find the first two installments here and here.