Hillary Clinton's strange debate tactics

I wrote last night that Hillary Clinton seemingly arrived at yesterday's debate not having firmly chosen a side in her campaign's internal debate about whether to go negative or stay positive. As a result, her performance was a strange mixture of politeness and nastiness that I suspect put off a lot of viewers (the "Hillary did better" media CW notwithstanding).

Pondering it some more this morning, I think what's even more puzzling is the specifics of her debate strategy (or lack thereof). When you really stop and think about which points she went negative on, and which points she stayed positive about, you're left wondering what on earth she was thinking. It's as if Mark Penn convinced her to take a couple of meaningless "gotcha" potshots, but forgot to mention that she also needed to aggressively and explicitly connecting her substantive, issue-based contrasts to her broader thematic attacks on Obama's qualifications. So basically, she went negative where she should have stayed positive, and stayed positive where she arguably should have gone negative.

Her two main barbs against Obama were both on utterly insubstantial non-issues: the "plagiarism" nonsense, and the embarrassing but monumentally unimportant fact than an Obama supporter blanked out during a live TV interview. (Does Hillary really want to get into what the candidates' supporters and surrogates say or don't say?) Meanwhile, on substantive issues -- stuff that actually matters -- she was gentle almost to the point of timidity. She drew some contrasts, yes, but she didn't try very hard to make those contrasts stick by explicitly tying them in with her campaign's big-picture themes: experience vs. inexperience, words vs. actions, etc.

For example, on the opening question about whether the president should meet with foreign leaders of enemy nations, Hillary could have set the tone for a full-frontal assault on Obama's qualifications and readiness to be president by going beyond simply saying that there is a "difference between us" about the particular issue in question. She could have argued that Obama's approach is dangerously naive, that it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of the presidency, and that it's proof he's not "ready from day one," whereas she is. She could have repeated this point when Pakistan briefly came up, calling attention to his controversial comments about that country a few months back. And she could have tied it all together when asked the softball question of whether Obama is ready to be commander-in-chief.

Instead, she basically punted that question, essentially ignored the Pakistan issue, and failed to make explicit the notion that Obama's meet-with-foreign-leaders position is not just wrong, but indicative of a broader unreadiness to be president. I guess she's hoping the voters will conclude that on their own (but as they haven't done so yet, it might be a little late for such a strategy). Either that, or she's afraid of saying it to Obama's face, because she doesn't want to give him a chance for a rebuttal -- possibly a well-founded fear, in light of how effortlessly he wiped the floor with her on the plagiarism issue and the actions-vs.-words question.

Similarly, on health care, instead of engaging Obama in a lengthy, informative but somewhat tedious back-and-forth over what will strike many voters as minutiae -- probably causing many viewers to have the same reaction that CNN's Leslie Sanchez had, that "Hillary Clinton was trying to show, I'm the smartest girl in the class" -- she could have put their disagreement into a broader thematic context and thus potentially made her point much more effectively. Imagine if she'd said something like:

Senator Obama says he doesn't want mandates. I understand why he's saying that: he knows the Republicans and the health-insurance companies and the lobbyists will demagogue the word 'mandates' to death. He knows they'll try to convince the public that any plan involving 'mandates' is somehow un-American. So he's willing to concede that point in an effort to, as he so often says, work together to get things done. The problem is, the Republicans are wrong about mandates, and we need to say that clearly, and we need to convince the public of that fact -- because without mandates, universal health care cannot happen.

Senator Obama likes to say he'll tell the public what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear, but in this case, he's doing precisely the opposite. He's telling you what you want to hear instead of having faith that when presented with all the facts, the public will make the right choice. We need to fight back against the Republican attack machine on this issue; we can't concede it. We have to fight it. And this is a great example of lofty, unifying rhetoric not being enough to solve our problems. In his effort to work together and achieve common ground, Senator Obama is actually undermining his whole policy. We cannot afford that. We need a president who will, yes, work together to achieve common ground when that's possible, but who will also go to the mat for the American people when an issue demands it. And I will be that president.

Now that would have been a potentially effective attack. But instead, Hillary focused her fire on Obama only with regard to utterly inconsequential bulls**t, while giving him a pass on the substantive issues where he's vulnerable. It's as if Mark Penn was a little devil sitting on her shoulder, poking her with his pitchfork whenever he thought she had an opening for a good zinger, while Mandy Grunwald, the angel on the other shoulder, was whispering answers in her ear for all the important questions. The end result was, IMHO, an utterly ineffective line of attack that made Hillary look petty without damaging Obama at all.

To be clear, I'm not necessarily advocating that she should have attacked Obama more vigorously on the substantive issues. As I said yesterday, she's in a real bind -- between Barack and a hard place, if you will -- in terms of whether to really go negative. My point is simply that, if she was going to go negative, she should have focused her fire on stuff that matters, stuff that will actually speak to voters, instead of irrelevant non-issues like "plagiarism" and an underprepared cable-news interviewee.

The fact that she unleashed those zingers tells me that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, last night's debate did not represent a new willingness on Hillary's part to "lose gracefully," or at least a desire to eschew negativity. Someone who's trying to "lose gracefully" or "stay positive" doesn't accuse her opponent of being a "Xeroxing" plagiarist with no accomplishments to his name. The fact is, Hillary did go negative. It's just that she did it ineffectively. She went negative on stupid "silly season" nonsense, while giving Obama a free pass on the important stuff. As a calculated decision, that makes zero sense, so I can only conclude that it was a tactical blunder, not a conscious and well-thought-out strategic choice.

All in all, I think last night was a colossal missed opportunity for Hillary. Her only saving grace is that the media CW -- which has so often been stacked against her -- is working in her favor this time, for some reason. Everybody's talking about how she "didn't go negative," even though that's not true, and how she "found her voice" again in her closing statement, even though she was actually channeling her husband's and John Edwards's voices. Meanwhile, some of Obama's most effective lines, particularly his rebuttal to the oft-repeated bogus charge that he lacks substance, aren't getting much play at all. So Hillary is winning the debate-about-the-debate. But she lost the debate, and I suspect the net effect will be that she loses votes among those who watched it live, which presumably includes a lot of Texas and Ohio voters.

Comments

[Mad Max, Esquire]

Hillary was for Obama before she was against him.

[Jim]

^ ha!

[nika]

This is website.a lot of guys can service for you , most skilled levelers and The price of power leveling. Give all customers the best and cheap price. The best and securest way to power level your character to your desired high level fast. the website already have done near a number of orders for wow power leveling and offers professional powerleveling service on most popular MMOGs.