Campaign calculus

Bill Clinton got elected president light years ago in 1992 when the South actually could put a Democrat in office.

A quarter-century ago, an especially talented young Democratic Southern governor could compete for votes for president from conservative-leaners in places like Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia and, of course, his own Arkansas and Al Gore's own Tennessee.

Even at that, Clinton got elected with only 43 percent of the vote, and then, in 1996, 49 percent.

Barack Obama got elected president as a Democrat much more recently and with intentionally narrower left-of-center appeal. If well-stated and well-executed, that focus could deliver this winning combination of blocs from concentrated locations:

• Young people with liberalized attitudes on cultural issues.

• Minorities.

• Upscale urban and suburban professionals in places like the Maryland and Virginia outskirts of Washington, D.C.

• Women recoiling in higher numbers from Republican notions on their reproductive health.

Thus Obama locked down a few decisive big electoral states--Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Florida--and, by galvanizing and mobilizing and inspiring those blocs, swept to victory with something Clinton never achieved, which was more than 50 percent of the vote.

Obama did not bother at all with rural expanses where there weren't so many people and where they didn't like his looks--places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky or West Virginia, where Bill had competed and won.

So now comes Hillary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2016. She enters with a game plan adapted from Obama's, not her husband's.

And now comes the New York Times to report that fact as if it's novel or not obvious. And the Times bandies about an odd little caveat--that Hillary is appealing to a polarized electorate that will make bipartisan governing harder if she is elected.

That's as if she shouldn't run to win, or by the straightest route.

It's as if polarization and dysfunction had not long preceded her campaign and emerged from other forces.

It's as if her husband Bill got anything other than impeached out of running more to the center.

It's as if Clinton got a single Republican vote in the entire Congress for his budget in 1993, weeks after running victoriously in Kentucky and West Virginia and Louisiana. He didn't. Not one.

For that matter, Obama came into the White House promising to reach out to Republicans. And Mitch McConnell promptly said the Republican focus was making him a one-term president.

The last Democratic presidential candidate who could have won with Bill's strategy--that would have been the Al Gore of 2000. He would have become president if he had carried even Arkansas.

Hillary's campaign manager, Robby Mook, is 35 years old. In 1992, when Bill was reaching out broadly to Middle America, Mook was ... well, he was but 12.

Bill is so 20th Century. Hillary's time is the 21st Century.

So this is not your father's Clinton campaign. Or James Carville's.

It distresses Bill to hear it, but the fact is that Obama has been transformative--on policy, with health care, and in politics, with the new winning calculus--while he was not.

All of that means Hillary will not compete in Arkansas, a state irrelevant in Obama's calculus, except and unless:

  1. She conceivably might suddenly show up close enough in polls in Arkansas that her Republican opponent would have to expend a few resources here to fortify and hold serve, thus losing those resources for Virginia or Indiana or North Carolina--states potentially in play by the Obama calculus.

  2. She can raise money here and mobilize grass-roots supporters for deployment elsewhere. She has surrounded herself with Obama campaign veterans in vaunted ground-game politics. In small gatherings all across Arkansas, Hillary supporters are signing up to do whatever is needed, which, by October 2016, likely would mean going elsewhere.

In 2008 some Little Rock women who had signed up to help Obama got assigned to spend an October weekend going door to door in unfriendly Springfield, Mo.

The reason was that, owing to St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri was in play--at least to the extent that Republicans couldn't take the state for granted--and a few women from Little Rock knocking on doors in Springfield might limit the hemorrhaging in that section of the state in a helpful way.

Obama lost Missouri--but by a scant 4,000 votes, 49.2 percent to John McCain's 49.4 percent. But he won Indiana and North Carolina, maybe because Republicans had to worry a little in the stretch about Missouri, maybe because some women for Little Rock had traipsed to Springfield to knock on alien doors.

------------v------------

John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/11/2015

Upcoming Events