In politics, anything can happen … but some things are a lot more likely than others. The Washington Post’s Anne Gearan reports today what everyone else has already surmised — that Hillary Clinton has shifted to the left in order to hold onto the Barack Obama coalition that lifted him to two victories, the second a bit more improbable than the first. However, that assumes that Hillary herself embodies the same qualities as Obama did to voters, and that he has pushed the electorate farther left over the last six-plus years:

Hillary Rodham Clinton is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge.

The moves are part of a strategic conclusion by Clinton’s emerging campaign: that it can harness the same kind of young and diverse coalition as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, bolstered by even stronger appeal among women.

Her approach — outlined in interviews with aides and advisers — is a bet that social and demographic shifts mean that no left-leaning position Clinton takes now would be likely to hurt her in making her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year.

There really are two assumptions here, neither of which has much evidence at the moment for their likelihood. On policy, Team Clinton has made at least one historical error in seizing onto a full-throated progressivism, which is that Obama never actually gave voice to that in presidential cycles. He talked about lowering the oceans and cooling the planet, but on policy Obama took care to paint himself as the center of American politics.

Obama’s opponents painted him as the vanguard of fringe progressivism, while Obama kept up a pretense of post-partisanship, especially in his first election. In 2012, Obama dispensed with the post-partisan posing but still claimed the center while painting his opponent Mitt Romney as both “severely conservative” and a One Percenter out of touch with the mainstream of American voters. The Obama campaign seized on Romney’s private “47 percent” remarks to underscore that impression.

He didn’t win by going “full progressive.” It’s worth noting that Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage, which so impresses Team Hillary, didn’t keep him from losing almost 4 million votes from 2008 to 2012. Romney actually added a million votes from John McCain’s total.

The second questionable assumption is that voters will equate Hillary to Obama in a transformational sense, and this is where the risk shoots sharply upward:

The strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign. It factors in that a majority of independent voters already support same-sex marriage and the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that Clinton endorsed this month.

Again, this seems like a fundamental misread of the last two election cycles. Obama captured the imagination of voters because he represented a fresh face and (supposedly) approach in politics. Voters saw him as a leader of a cool and hip new generation of Americans who would put politics on a different path than the partisan wars that erupted after Watergate, not as an extension of the Clintons — in fact, Obama ran implicitly against a return to the 1990s. Instead, Hillary took part in Watergate and has been in and around Washington since 1993, a power player in exactly the kind of politics that those voters wanted to escape.

The opportunity to do what Hillary’s team proposes actually belongs to the Republicans, especially after eight years of disappointment with Obama. They have the fresh faces, the outside-the-Beltway options, several of whom can show success in executive management. More to the point, they have candidates who can connect far better with younger voters and independents than the woman who failed at that same task in 2008.

It’s politics, and anything could happen. But I wouldn’t put money down on Hillary Clinton creaking into a second presidential run as the third term of Barack Obama and inspiring a 2008-style turnout on the basis of her charisma.