Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. Hey, that’s what pundits have been saying ever since this endless campaign began. You have to go back to Al Gore in 2000 to find a politician who faced as much jeering from the news media, over everything from claims of dishonesty (which usually turn out to be based on nothing) to matters of personal style.
Strange to say, however, Mrs. Clinton won the Democratic
nomination fairly easily, and now, having pummeled her opponent in three
successive debates, is an overwhelming favorite to win in November, probably by
a wide margin. How is that possible?
The usual suspects are already coalescing around an
answer — namely, that she just got lucky. If only the Republicans hadn’t
nominated Donald Trump, the story goes, she’d be losing badly.
But here’s a contrarian thought: Maybe Mrs. Clinton is
winning because she possesses some fundamental political strengths — strengths
that fall into many pundits’ blind spots.
First of all, who was this other, stronger candidate that
the G.O.P. might have chosen? Remember, Mr. Trump won the nomination because he
gave his party’s base what it wanted, channeling the racial antagonism that has
been the driving force for Republican electoral success for decades. All he did
was say out loud what his rivals were trying to convey with dog whistles, which
explains why they were so ineffective in opposing him.
And those establishment candidates were much more
Trumpian than those fantasizing about a different history — say, one in which
the G.O.P. nominated Marco Rubio — acknowledge. Many people remember Mr.
Rubio’s brain glitch: the canned lines about “let’s dispel with this fiction”
that he kept repeating in a disastrous debate performance. Fewer seem aware
that those lines actually enunciated a crazy conspiracy theory, essentially
accusing President Obama of deliberately weakening America. Is that really much
better than the things Mr. Trump says? Only if you imagine that Mr. Rubio
didn’t believe what he was saying — yet his insincerity, the obvious way he was
trying to play a part, was surely part of his weakness.
That is, in fact, a general problem for establishment
Republicans. How many of them really believe that tax cuts have magical powers,
that climate change is a giant hoax, that saying the words “Islamic terrorism”
will somehow defeat ISIS? Yet pretending to believe these things is the price
of admission to the club — and the falsity of that pretense shines through.
And one more point about Mr. Rubio: why imagine that a
man who collapsed in the face of childish needling from Mr. Trump would have
triumphed over the woman who kept her cool during 11 hours of grilling over
Benghazi, and made her interrogators look like fools? Which brings us to the
question of Mrs. Clinton’s strengths.
When political commentators praise political talent, what
they seem to have in mind is the ability of a candidate to match one of a very
limited set of archetypes: the heroic leader, the back-slapping regular guy
you’d like to have a beer with, the soaring orator. Mrs. Clinton is none of
these things: too wonky, not to mention too female, to be a regular guy, a
fairly mediocre speechifier; her prepared zingers tend to fall flat.
Yet the person tens of millions of viewers saw in this
fall’s debates was hugely impressive all the same: self-possessed, almost
preternaturally calm under pressure, deeply prepared, clearly in command of
policy issues. And she was also working to a strategic plan: Each debate
victory looked much bigger after a couple of days, once the implications had
time to sink in, than it may have seemed on the night.
Oh, and the strengths she showed in the debates are also
strengths that would serve her well as president. Just thought I should mention
that. And maybe ordinary citizens noticed the same thing; maybe obvious
competence and poise in stressful situations can add up to a kind of star
quality, even if it doesn’t fit conventional notions of charisma.
Furthermore, there’s one thing Mrs. Clinton brought to
this campaign that no establishment Republican could have matched: She truly
cares about her signature issues, and believes in the solutions she’s pushing.
I know, we’re supposed to see her as coldly ambitious and
calculating, and on some issues — like macroeconomics — she does sound a bit
bloodless, even when she clearly understands the subject and is talking good
sense. But when she’s talking about women’s rights, or racial injustice, or
support for families, her commitment, even passion, are obvious. She’s genuine,
in a way nobody in the other party can be.
So let’s dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton is
only where she is through a random stroke of good luck. She’s a formidable
figure, and has been all along.
***Read my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow me on Twitter, @PaulKrugman.
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