I love politics. I really do. I’ve been watching the races on both sides and it’s like heroin. I can’t get enough of it. I fancy myself an amateur Karl Rove, always thinking of diabolical ways for one candidate to get an advantage over another. In that spirit, I’m going to give some advice to Hillary. God knows she needs it.
She seems like such a smart person (corrupt, pandering, etc.), but smart. And yet from the get go, her campaign strategy has been a mess. She started off with inevitability. That didn’t work because people don’t like being told who they have to vote for. Then she moved to the theme of experience. If that motivated voters, we would have had President Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd as Veep. Next she unleashed Bill, which painted her as the candidate who likes to pull the wings off butterflies. Yes! a tired old puppy kicker who you have no choice but to vote for. Now that’ll get the voters excited! I mean really, how many millions has she payed to the morons running her campaign? Okay, enough with trashing the woman. I don’t want to be a pit bull kicker.
What her Million Dollar Brain Trust has failed to focus on is simply that a lot of people can’t stand Hillary and everyone loves Obama, and because they have ignored that basic truth they have been unable to ask the simple question “how can we make people like her, and not like him?” So here’s my take on what Hillary should do. Let’s break this into two parts. First, why does everyone hate her? And second, why does everybody love Obama?
I have heard people on her campaign staff, people from the Clinton White House, people in the media, and even Republican politicians, say that in person she is friendly, genuine, funny. She’s charming! But when she’s on stage she’s shrill, fake, unlikable, and yet at the same time somehow manages to be boring. Quite a feat, if I do say so myself. So how do we fix this? First of all, look at what’s different between the two settings. The charming Hillary is talking to people one on one, without a script or talking points. The un-charming Hillary is talking to large crowds from a script trying to squeeze in as many talking points as possible. Solution: get rid of the crowds, scripts and talking points.
From this point forward, every Clinton campaign rally should consist of the following: Hillary will walk out on stage and say “I’m here, so we can get to know each other.” She’ll then bring a randomly chosen member of the audience (no plants, please) up on stage to sit down with her and the two of them will have a conversation. For a full half hour she will listen to anything the voter wants to say, she will answer the voters questions. They’ll talk. And she will do it from the heart, one on one without a script and without talking points. If it devolves into questions like “why do you always wear pants suits?”, or even “why did you stay with your husband after he did all that stuff?”, so much the better. It will make her human.
Every voter in that room and by extension, every voter watching on TV will vicariously be sitting in that chair, talking to the charming Hillary that people know in private. Here’s an added twist for authenticity (something else she desperately needs). Rather than have the voter selected by campaign staff, ask the news media to pick an average voter out of the crowd for her. You can’t get more open and authentic than that. If she started doing this, first of all she would get all the media attention in the world, because it’s such an unconventional, and more to the point un-Hillary thing to do. The media would eat it up like free scotch on the press plane. (Yes, I know you don’t eat scotch, but what the hell, you get the point.)
Now that we’ve made people like Hillary, we have to flip to the other side of the coin and make people not like Obama. To do this we first have to understand why they do like him. Last year he was ranked as the most liberal member of the United States Senate. More liberal than John Kerry, more liberal than Ted Kennedy, more liberal than Bernie Sanders of Vermont who proudly describes himself as a socialist. He is a left wing extremist, even by the standards of Democratic primary voters, so we know it’s not his policy positions that are attracting so many people. We know it’s not his competence and experience because, well, he doesn’t have any. Is it his sterling character? He may be cleaner than she is, but he ain’t squeaky. So what is it? What’s his secret weapon that makes young girls swoon and tough men cry? Answer: he knows how to give a speech.
Actually, that’s one hell of an understatement. Saying that Barack Obama knows how to give a speech is like saying that Muhammad Ali knew how to throw a punch. He’s probably the most gifted American political orator of the past half-century. Reagan, Kennedy, FDR, he may be better than all of them. That’s one hell of a political weapon, but it’s his only one. Without his amazing speaking ability he would still be an obscure state Senator tangled up with a shady developer. If you could take his one weapon away from him, he’d fold like an empty cheap suit. The question is how? Answer: turn his eloquence into a liability.
Hillary needs to start a media campaign pushing one message, that Obama’s ability to give an amazing speech is hiding the fact that he’s not competent to be president. It has to be done gently (remember, no puppy kicking) but it must be clear, and it must be consistent. The goal is to create an association in the voters’ minds between his soaring rhetoric and a complete lack of substance. If this message can be driven home, every time a voter hears Obama give an inspirational stemwinder, it will trigger the secondary thought “Wow, he really can give a speech. It’s too bad he can’t do anything else.”
This attack won’t work with everybody. Too many people have already joined his cult and won’t listen to any criticism of their new Messiah, but it will work with some people. It will work with uncommitted voters, and more importantly, it will work with the media because deep down they already know it’s true. They just need someone to give them permission to say that the emperor has no clothes.
So that’s my advice to Hillary. Be charming in public and convince voters that Obama is an idiot with a great voice. I can’t guarantee it will be enough to turn things around this late in the game, but it’s the best chance she’s got. Or she can just give up and join us in welcoming our new ObaMaster.
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