Hillary Clinton’s strategy has been obvious for a while. That strategy, just to be clear, is to get as many people as possible to believe that she is for what they are for, without actually committing herself to anything. You don’t really need to do a statistical analysis of her speeches in order to demonstrate this basic fact about her campaign, but it doesn’t hurt, and if you’d like to see such an analysis, check it out here.
Clinton is hardly unique among politicians in adopting this strategy. In fact, the cynical among us might say that it differs not at all from the strategy employed in 2008 by our current president. We have all seen those bumper stickers asking us how we like all that hope and change stuff. The sad fact is that those stickers make a point, though not the point intended by those who display them. We heard what we wanted to hear in 2008. It just turns out that what we heard wasn’t what Obama was saying. In fact, he wasn’t saying anything much. It remains to be seen whether Clinton can get away with the same strategy this year, given her baggage, which includes close and notorious ties to our Wall Street oppressors. Obama had close ties too, but they weren’t notorious and Wall Street wasn’t in as bad an odor then as it is now.
In a world tending more toward the perfect than our own, it would be the job of the press to pin Clinton down. But that’s not a job in which the media has much real interest. Sure, they’d like to bring her down, but they want to do it on their own terms, through overblown scandals, insinuation and a sense of personal aggrievement. They moan about a lack of access, but if they get it, they want to ask questions about Benghazi or emails, not about things that matter to the American people. So, one can’t complain about Hillary keeping them at arm’s length.
Still, I’m an optimist. (No, really, despite what opinions to the contrary you may have formed by reading this blog.) Hillary is going to come under pressure to declare herself, not from the press, but from the other Democratic candidates and the people. People are fed up, and I think they’re tired of bullshit, which is precisely what Hillary is selling these days.
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