Hillary Clinton and the art of jujitsu
Hillary Rodham Clinton is tied as closely as a candidate can be to two Democratic administrations past. But she intends to wage her presidential campaign around a rich menu of policies and plans that are about the future.
She has been in our national consciousness so long that she has little room to invent a New Hillary. But she can encourage voters to look at the Clinton they think they know in a different light. They might begin to view traits her enemies deride as, instead, necessary virtues in a time requiring toughness and resilience.
She confronts a political discourse drenched in the cliches of political positioning — about moving left or right, “rallying the base,” “recreating the Obama coalition.” But like her husband before her, Clinton is trying to forge a new consensus and is unashamed to pile up policy proposals: on family leave, child care, college affordability, incentives to employers for higher wages, immigration reform, clean energy and limits on the power of wealthy campaign donors.
Her platform is more progressive because the political center is in a different place in 2015 than it was in 1991 when Bill Clinton touted his “New Covenant.” Americans are more socially liberal now. The financial implosion of 2008 fostered a deep skepticism about Wall Street. Growing resentment of inequality, stagnating wages and blocked social mobility is justified not by ideology but by the often bitter facts about contemporary capitalism.
Hillary Clinton’s kickoff in New York on Saturday sent all these messages. The venue itself, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, oddly captured the vast diversity and glorious contradictions of the country she hopes to lead.
Saturday was an occasion for her brand of political jujitsu. Clinton’s Republican foes cast her as the candidate of the past, but it was the GOP, she insisted, whose ideas come from long ago and far away. Her lengthy list of the things government needs to do in the 21st century to create “real and lasting prosperity ... built by all and shared by all” punched her argument home: A party with a 19th century view of capitalism and the state is not up to the job.
Above all, she took all of the blows against her and turned them into badges of endurance, toughness and empathy for those who have to come back “no matter what the world throws at you.”
By rooting her effort in a comprehensive list of reforms, Hillary Rodham Clinton is making a bet and issuing a challenge. The bet is that voters will pay more attention to what she can do for them than to what her opponents will say about her.
The challenge is to her Republican adversaries: Can they go beyond low- tax, antigovernment bromides to make credible counteroffers to the nurses, truckers, factory workers and food servers whom Clinton made the heroes of her Roosevelt Island narrative about grace under pressure? Finally, the battle has been joined.