Tom Finneran: Good Morning, Madame President
Friday, July 11, 2014
Some women will be delirious with joy. Other women will be sensibly impressed that the historic limitations of gender have been shed. Some men will be too. Men with daughters. Mrs. Clinton will join Ghandi, Meir, Thatcher, Merkel, and others as a historic world figure and an accomplished practitioner of the art of politics.
Her election will not be a coronation. Nor should it be. America should never do coronations. Rather, we do long, hard, grueling elections. Elections, particularly to the office of the President, are a particularly vexsome trial and Hillary’s election will not be a cakewalk. But she has advantages that will be difficult for a challenger to overcome.
One of those advantages is her gender. A huge bloc of the electorate senses a real double standard in the critique and evaluation of women candidates and they want to put an end to it. Male candidates can have extra chins, skinny legs, ill-fitting suits, and lousy neckties and no one comments. Heaven forbid that a female candidate should not be picture-perfect in every possible way. In fact, if she is attractive, in good shape, and well-dressed the commentary will inevitably suggest that she is shallow and superficial. It’s really not a fair political world at the moment and that impatient bloc of voters wants to demolish that inequity.
Another big advantage for Hillary is her fundraising prowess. Her name recognition is sky-high and her husband, the former President, will be calling every political donor in America on behalf of his wounded bride. Those donors, surveying the current landscape and the dearth of opposing candidates, will come on board early in the process, thus denying any erstwhile candidates the crucial oxygen they need to survive and compete.
A third advantage comes from the terrible campaign she ran in 2008 against Barack Obama. While she may have been immensely frustrated at the free pass he was given by the media, such frustration does not excuse the many blunders and outright mismanagement of her own campaign. She has lots of scar tissue from that experience and scar tissue is always instructive. She’ll run a much better campaign this time around, effectively grounding the high-priced consultants whose warring egos cost her time, money, and credibility in 2008. And her campaign troops will know the difference between a primary state and a caucus state….it’s a crucial distinction which Obama’s team mastered and Hillary’s team screwed up. It was a lesson in head-shaking ineptitude which will not happen again. Lesson learned.
She’ll also be acceptably competent on the issues facing the nation. No one really expects soaring inspiring oratory from Hillary Clinton. Rather, people expect a solid familiarity with the challenges we face and a hands-on skill set to address those challenges. Consider President Obama, whose current political troubles spring in part from the over-hyped and utterly ridiculous expectations to which many people gave their voice. When the press fawns and slobbers like moonstruck adolescents, the public fairly expects some kind of Messiah-in-waiting. It may have helped Barack if someone had actually pointed out that he is not Jesus of Nazareth.
Watch too for Hillary to begin a slow, steady, measureable move away from the Obama Administration and some of its policies in the weeks and months ahead. She will not want to be described as an Obama clone or “Barack-lite”, particularly if this fall’s elections turn out to be another Democratic mid-term disaster. If certain media reports are to be believed, there is no love lost between the Obamas and the Clintons. Perhaps their relationships are purely transactional rather than personal. It happens in politics. Hillary is smart enough to know that she cannot allow herself to be saddled with every element of the President’s policies. Call it the sidestep slidestep strategy.
Finally, Hillary knows that the press will return to its more traditional adversarial posture. She will not be given the Barack treatment of dewy eyes, quivering legs, and supine promotion. The hard edge of the press will emerge which I think she can handle. She has come of age watching and engaging that more hard-edged press and she will be prepared. In many ways, she and we will be better off for it.
Many things can change between now and the fall of 2016. Perhaps the left-wing of the Democratic Party will diss Hillary and embrace a new candidate for their favored causes. Perhaps the Republicans will nominate a compelling candidate who can skillfully capture the mood and imagination of the electorate. Perhaps Hillary herself will forego the campaign, disdain the prize and decide not to run…perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
I think not. Remember these words: “Good morning Madame President.”
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