The way Hillary can win in 2016

All this is housekeeping. What’s at the core of her run?

It could be this: It’s time to get to work. It’s time to get things done. And I can do it, because I’ve done it. She’ll set a couple of broad goals, like fixing health care, tax reform, certainly something involving fundamentally and transformationally addressing economic inequalities, and she’ll hammer and hammer and hammer them in. If she’s going to imprint a subtle message, it’s probably this: What Obama wants to do is broadly popular. For some reason, he couldn’t get it done. I’m going to expand upon his agenda in some areas, make adjustments in others, because the country is at a different place and I’m a different person, and pursue my own policies where I think I would make the most impact.

But also, this: Political reform. Bashing big money interests on the right is a given, especially because Democratic activists now have a very coherent meta-narrative about how the corporatist right has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams (anti-regulation, gutting campaign finance, cutting and bashing government). Clinton’s reforms will drive Washington back onto the road. She has a much more visceral feel for politics than Obama, and because she enjoys it more, I think she’ll be better at it. She will take opportunities where Obama would not have and make others. Now, yes, the country wants to throw daggers at Washington, and yes, Chris Christie will run as the “got-it-done” reformer from New Jersey.