Tag: hillary clinton announcement
Analysis: How Clinton Video Was Designed Face By Face

Analysis: How Clinton Video Was Designed Face By Face

By David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton can be a strong presidential candidate only if she gets broad, enthusiastic support from a new generation of voters. And that may be tough.

She’s the far-ahead front-runner for the Democratic nomination and may well coast to the party’s convention in 2016. But without the backing of younger voters, particularly women, as well as independents and liberals, she faces trouble in the general election.

The former secretary of state’s 2 minute, 18 second announcement video Sunday went right after those constituencies. It prominently featured a young mother, a woman in her 20s looking for work, an engaged same-sex couple and young children.

President Barack Obama eight years ago knew how to tap into that generation and its yen for younger, fresher politicians. He used social media as no national figure ever had before.

“Part of his appeal was ideological and part was generational,” said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research in Florida.

In many ways, Clinton faces the same kind of challenge that’s tested Democratic frontrunners for decades. Democratic presidential candidates usually fall into one of two camps. There are the “inevitable” nominees who build support from the party establishment, notably labor unions, elected officials and big donors. Then there are the insurgents who are repelled by many of those same forces.

Clinton is more popular with women than men, but there’s been evidence that younger women are not eagerly embracing her, or for that matter the Democratic party.

“Women under 30 tend to look for something new,” said Coker.

They often didn’t rally around the Democrats’ efforts in 2014 U.S. Senate races to accuse Republicans of waging a “war on women.”

Such tactics remain problematic. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that 42 percent of all women in swing state Colorado, where the war-on- woman strategy backfired, found Clinton trustworthy.

One bright note for Clinton: She did better among women in the poll’s Iowa findings. The nation’s first caucus state is far more familiar with her, and she plans to make to her first campaign stop this week.

Even there, though, recent news was not all positive. Quinnipiac’s March 29-April 7 poll found her favorability among all voters in Iowa has “dropped significantly.”

Clinton will find in Iowa and elsewhere another hurdle: convincing Democratic liberals.

One potential pitfall will be her vote in the Senate in 2002 to support the war in Iraq.

It likely hurt her in 2008 against Barack Obama, who opposed the war. And former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee is thinking of challenging her for the nomination in part to remind Democrats of her pro-war vote. Chafee is not in he same category as Obama and unlikely to seriously contest for the nomination, but raising the issue on a debate stage could rekindle liberal doubts about Clinton.

So far, other potential challengers have been careful not to sharply criticize Clinton, and have gained little political traction.

By going too far left, though, Clinton risks alienating independent voters she many need in some primaries, where they can vote Democratic, as well as the general election.

Should no serious Democratic challenger emerge, and the skeptics remain unconvinced, the danger for Clinton is that she wins almost by default, a too-common occurrence with Democratic front-runners.

Former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1983 and 1984 sewed up almost every Democratic establishment figure, only to have barely-known Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado suddenly emerge as a challenger.

The left, independents and younger voters all hungered for someone new and out of the usual box, and eight days after Mondale won Iowa, Hart buried him in the New Hampshire primary. Mondale eventually won the nomination, but as a weakened candidate.

The blueprint for Clinton could be her husband. As Bill Clinton sought the 1992 nomination, liberals rallied around Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts or Jerry Brown, the once and future California governor.

Clinton strategists figured Brown and Tsongas lacked the broad support to mount a strong challenge, and they were right. As the primary season ended, Clinton strengthened his appeal to independents by slamming hip-hop artist Sister Souljah.

A month later, the 45-year-old Clinton picked Al Gore, then 43, as his running mate. The bid for younger voters helped make his campaign all about a new generation bent on improving a rickety economy.

Clinton, 67, won’t have that advantage. Liberals are unenthusiastic, and independents are skeptical. Under-30 voters were in elementary school when her husband won the White House.

Her big advantage as she starts this journey: “There’s a bloc of voters looking for an anti-Clinton candidate, and just can’t find one,” Coker said.

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Image: Screenshot via YouTube/Hillary Clinton

Analysis: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign: It’s Not About Me, It’s About You

Analysis: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign: It’s Not About Me, It’s About You

By Cathleen Decker, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

If Hillary Rodham Clinton gets her way, there will be stark differences between her failed 2008 run for president and the White House campaign she began Sunday — and not just the end result.

This time, her aides have said for days, the focus will be on the American people, not on Clinton –– on their needs and concerns and not her reach for history.

The shift was abundantly clear in the contrast between her 2007 announcement video and the one she aired Sunday as she jumped into the race — each just over two minutes long.

Last time: Clinton sitting in a sumptuously appointed living room, alone as she faces the camera.

This time: She doesn’t even appear in her own video until a minute and a half in, after cameos by more than a dozen people representing a demographic cross section of America. Even then the view is the back of her head.

Last time: Thirty-one uses of the word “I,” more than twice the use of the word “we.”

This time: Only four uses of the word “I” as Clinton moves to make her campaign a communal effort, and one that focuses strongly on the economic unease that has persisted during the two terms of the man who defeated her in 2008, President Obama.

If Clinton’s effort this time is meant to do anything, it is to undo the destructive sense last time that hers was the entitled, imperial candidacy, that she was owed the White House.

The new subtext is set by the last person to speak before Clinton herself, a man talking about his pride about recently joining a fifth-generation family business: “This country was founded on hard work.”

Clinton then enters for 43 seconds of remarks — some made over video of her talking to people — and closing with her talking from a sidewalk. It could be the sidewalk in front of the well-appointed home in which she sat in 2007, of course, but it reads visually as if she’s part of the neighborhood, not alone inside a mansion.

“I’m getting ready to do something too — I’m running for president,” she says.
Then an immediate segue to the campaign’s economic underpinnings, in rhetoric more associated with Democrats such as fist-shaking populist Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, than Clinton.

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times, but the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” she says. “Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion, so you can do more than just get by_you can get ahead and stay ahead because when families are strong America is strong.”

Then her closing message, subtly stated: No entitlement here.

“So,” she says, “I’m hitting the road to earn your vote. Because it’s your time and I hope you’ll join me on this journey.”

Part of Clinton’s challenge, of course, will be blunting Republican assertions that the entire Obama presidency — to which she is inextricably linked, as his first secretary of state — has been a failure. The video — let’s face it, Clinton’s first campaign ad — offers a reproach of that argument. Everyone in it is forging ahead, glimmering with optimism.

There are people planting gardens. People packing and moving for their family’s betterment, not because they lost their home. A couple expecting a child, the greatest exemplar of optimism. A gay couple planning their marriage. People renovating homes, starting new careers.

It was not hard to grasp from it another Clinton theme: America, under Obama, moved from economic collapse to a frail recovery. And I’ll get you the rest of the way home.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC