(CNN)On Saturday, June 13, Hillary Clinton will deliver an important address at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedom Parks in New York to officially launch her campaign, a follow-up to her video announcing her candidacy. The speech, according to campaign officials, “will lay out her view of the challenges facing this country and her vision and ideas for moving the country.”
There is a lot for Clinton supporters to be excited about. Notwithstanding all the ups and downs of the first few weeks of her rollout, Clinton still looks like a strong candidate.
Though there have been three primary challengers to emerge, Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, she is still largely considered to be a lock for the nomination. Her fund raising strength and her electoral support, as well as the overall package that she offers as a candidate for the Democratic Party in 2016, are formidable. Clinton still polls ahead of all the Republican candidates including Jeb Bush.
Yet there is clearly unease among many Democrats. There have been stories about the fact that Sen. Sanders, who most people doubt has a chance of even winning a caucus or primary, is drawing big crowds during his speeches and is electrifying audiences. The ongoing stories in the mainstream press, stimulated by Peter Schweitzer’s provocative book about the Clinton Foundation, have produced a flurry of articles questioning the Clintons’ ties to corporate money.
Upsetting to her supporters are a number of recent polls that have shown her favorability rating to be at or well below 50%. When asked in one survey whether voters trusted her, a whopping57% responded that at this time they did not.
Some of the underlying challenges that Hillary Clinton will have to address before the general election in the fall of 2016 are becoming very clear. Talk about any kind of crisis for her campaign is overblown, but the opportunity for correction and improvement is very real.
She needs to work on the ‘T’ word
While winning the nomination should still be relatively straightforward, Clinton should use these valuable months to effectively work through some of the negative perceptions that exist within the electorate and to fortify her position by answering, rather than evading, these concerns.
Most important of all is trust. This is an issue that has dogged Hillary Clinton since she was the first lady. Will voters trust her to do what she says? For decades, the Clintons have come under attack for the veracity of their words. Much of this, unfairly, is about her husband and not her.
Bill Clinton was well known over the decades for being willing to cut a deal that undercut his allies and friends. Many Democrats felt that way in the 1990s when he agreed to eliminate the federal welfare program, AFDC, or responded to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 by later saying that “The Era of Big Government Is Over.” Democrats felt betrayed when they learned that he lied to the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, given the high risks he knew this posed for the party.
The perception also stems from the intense fervor for investigation that her conservative opponents have had since the early part of Clinton’s time as first lady. They have mounted an aggressive push to undermine her credibility with charges of lying and scandal.
As a political candidate, Hillary Clinton herself has continually struggled to overcome this image. The debate in the 2008 primaries about her record on Iraq grew out of these concerns as much as it did over concerns that she was too hawkish on Iraq. Democrats, for example, pounced on questions about trust after her long-winded answer in a debate explaining her position on granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Now she will face this challenge again.
What does she really stand for?
Regardless of what is fair and what is partisan slander, Clinton has to outline what positions she stands for and make a strong case to the public about for the priorities she would pursue as president. She has to distance herself from the neoliberal economic record of her husband, and to demonstrate to voters that she comes from a very different Democratic tradition, one more closely tied to labor-based, middle-class economics attuned to the need for government to help mitigate social inequality and economic downturns.
There needs to be more New Deal, and less DLC (the centrist organization her husband helped create). Given that recent polls show Americans are greatly concerned about inequality of wealth and income, considering it to be a major issue, the political value of taking this stand should also be clear.
Hillary Clinton will also have to sort out where she stands on money and politics. Many of the stories that have been damaging to her early campaign have touched on something essential to the Clintons since the 1990s — their close relations to the world of Wall Street and campaign donors. Though there really haven’t been any smoking guns showing that Hillary Clinton ever did anything wrong, the stories revealed that the couple lives in an insular world of wealthy campaign contributors.
These relationships touch on a toxic element of our current political system. This is not new. The Clintons have always been very skilled and connected in this world. This has been one of their strengths as partisans. But at a moment when polls show enormous concern about the role of money and politics this can be a vulnerability, and opponents can use it to portray her as a candidate disconnected from the world of average citizens.
And Clinton will have to figure out how to position herself in relationship to the incumbent president. This is always an enormous challenge for a candidate, ordinarily a vice president, of the same party as a second term president.
Obama’s record is politically complicated. For many Democrats, there is not much of a problem. The president has a robust record, they say. On domestic policy, he was able to secure passage of important domestic legislation like the Affordable Care Act that Clinton needs to defend.
The worst possible strategy, they feel, is to play into the Republican criticism and accept that Obama’s programs were flawed. On foreign policy, Obama’s supporters feel that she should stand by the administration’s record that has made diplomacy and international alliances central to conducting foreign affairs, all the while keeping much of the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs in place.
But Clinton, like everyone else in the political world, realizes that President Obama’s record has much baggage. Many Americans are not satisfied with his domestic record and view the domestic programs as flawed. Even a large number of progressives feel that Obama sold out his coalition and agreed to corporate-based solutions to public policy that have been flawed from the start.
For conservatives, and many independents, everything about the administration has been a disaster. In their view, Obama’s foreign policy has been a decision to stand still as terrorist networks expand and his domestic policies have been one flawed program after another.
Hillary Clinton has not yet clearly explained how she will handle this challenge. The speech should be a start. She needs to figure out a way to differentiate herself from the failures and problems, without making the mistake that Vice President Al Gore did in 2000 of separating himself from the very assets that the incumbent president brings to the table.
The next few months will thus be critical for Clinton, not in terms of winning or losing the nomination, but in effectively dealing with some of the underlying vulnerabilities which have become clear. This is the time when she can do this by clarifying positions, showing voters her character more clearly and knocking down some of the questions that have emerged.
If she does not, these vulnerabilities will come back to bite her in the general election as Republicans will seek to spread doubts about Clinton to win their way back into the White House.
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