Clinton has remarkable trouble shifting into a more progressive gear. When Clinton visited Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s territory last October, she tried to imitate the progressive icon, saying, “Don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs.” But within a few days she was clarifying and retracting those remarks.
For some time we have been told that Clinton intends to “run as a woman.” By framing her candidacy in the terms of her sex, she has a way of connecting her personal story to concerns like paid maternity leave. One suspects that this is also a way of baiting Republicans into self-detonating on women’s issues. There is very little doubt that ’90s-style resentment and hatred of Hillary will boil over within the conservative movement’s media organs. Talk radio and the guttersnipes of the right will encourage Republican candidates to dance maniacally through a war-on-women minefield. (A Clinton presidency is better for their business anyway.)
But running as a woman isn’t enough. Clinton has to execute a difficult maneuver. She must draw on nostalgia for the 1990s, when broad economic gains seemed to be more equitably shared, while still coming across as her own woman and not as a retread of her husband’s presidency. On top of this, she has to avoid becoming the Bob Dole of the race, a candidate who pines for the good ol’ days. That would be especially disastrous against a candidate like Marco Rubio, whose youth and ethnicity can’t help but evoke America’s future.
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