Running Without A Campaign

Lynn Vavreck sees it as hazardous for Hillary Clinton:

This is the danger for Mrs. Clinton in running a quasi-campaign instead of a real campaign and holding off on discussing the things she would do as president if she were to run and win. She risks campaigning in a low-information environment of her own making. And that means that instead of debating whether her tax policies would help the middle class, we are left to talk about whether her conception of herself as not “truly well-off” or “dead broke” means she cannot relate to the middle class. Instead of asking what qualities she would favor in nominating justices to the Supreme Court, we instead focus on whether she hid or changed her public position on gay equality over the decades because it was politically expedient.

My deeper worry is that this kind of blah blah tour is where Clinton is most comfortable. Because she does actually and rather aggressively suck at politics itself:

Consider that Clinton has run in three elections. Her two wins in New York are not all that impressive, really. Instead of facing the powerful and well-funded Rudy Giuliani in 2000, who withdrew for health reasons, she was up against Representative Rick Lazio. Lazio only entered the race five months before it ended. And in her re-election in 2006, the New York GOP let a Yonkers mayor, John Spencer, be the sacrificial lamb…

And of course she lost the only electoral race where she faced a credible opponent. In the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination she blew a massive early lead. One of the only reasons she did not get completely pasted by Barack Obama was his horrible off-the-record flub about rural voters “clinging to their guns and religion.” Clinton immediately invented a strategy later used by the Tea Party and Glenn Beck of trying to tar Obama as an alien and radical. In their April 16 debate in Pennsylvania, she tried to highlight Obama’s “relationship with Reverend Farrakhan” and portray him as a supporter of Hamas. This strategy failed utterly.

If I were a Democrat, I’d worry about her useless stump speeches, her increasingly regal and dynastic affect, her lack of any appreciable political instincts, and her propensity to regard herself as a beleaguered victim. Apart from all that, I couldn’t be more impressed.