Defying the Odds

by James W. Ceaser

  Without Biden in the race, it appeared that there was only one likely nominee.

  HRC

  For years, the cliché was that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. While the Democrats had a chaotic primary fight, the thinking went, the GOP would usually turn to the candidate who was “next in line,” a runner-up from a previous contest. This description fit Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. In 2016, Republicans blew up the “next in the GOP line” theory by blowing off their 2008 and 2012 runners-up, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. This time, the next-in-line theory applied better to the Democratic side.

  Despite her loss to Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton had come close. At the time that Obama clinched the nomination, Clinton had won a plurality of pledged delegates chosen in primaries.42 Obama edged her out in the overall tally by winning more caucus delegates and superdelegates. She had made a strategic blunder by assuming that high-profile primary victories would create an unstoppable political momentum. The data-driven Obama campaign had correctly focused on fundraising and delegate arithmetic. She would remember this lesson.

  In 2008, she had little time to mourn her defeat, because Obama chose her to be secretary of state. In one sense, the job was a traditional stepping stone to the White House. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan had all held the post before becoming president. True, no secretary of state had gone on to the White House since the Civil War, but the office would provide her with a chance to become a player on the world stage and gain high-level administrative experience. The meritocrat from Wellesley College and Yale Law School would gain unquestionable credentials as the “best-qualified” candidate.

  By accepting the offer, she tethered her fate to Obama’s. If he succeeded in foreign policy, she would share the credit. If he failed, she failed. It initially seemed like a great wager, because within two years, Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize and ended the American combat mission in Iraq. Over time, the record got murkier. The war in Afghanistan did not really stop, and notwithstanding a drawdown, some U.S. troops would stay there through the last days of his administration. After a much-publicized “reset,” relations with Russia remained difficult and eventually worsened. Civil war in Syria and the rise of ISIS roiled the Middle East. A 2012 terror attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Mitt Romney tried to use the attack against Obama, without success. For Clinton, the Benghazi issue would have a surprising and distressing durability.

  By the end of her State Department tenure in 2013, Hillary Clinton had come a long way from Little Rock. In the earlier days, the Clintons were a “two for one blue plate special,” a pair of policy wonks who specialized in domestic issues. Now she was the lead Clinton and a foreign policy expert. Back then, they were not too far removed from ordinary life. Arkansas has long underpaid its governors, and even with her legal income, the Clintons were not living in luxury. Since his presidency, however, both had made millions through book sales and high speaking fees. They had befriended economic leaders throughout America and the world, and they had used these connections to fund the Clinton Foundation. Along the way, she grew vulnerable to the charge that she was living in an elite “bubble.” When a journalist asked about her riches, she said that she and Bill Clinton had left the White House “dead broke”—a claim that drew scolding from fact-checkers and derisive laughter across the political spectrum.43 She also acknowledged that she had not driven a car since 1996.44 It was a small detail, and it was understandable in light of the couple’s Secret Service protection. But it was one more thing that undermined her claim that she was in touch with struggling American families.

  Another change was so obvious that it was easy to overlook: the sheer passage of time. In the 1992 campaign, the Clintons had run on their youth and energy, and their theme music was “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow.” As Hillary Clinton prepared for a 2016 campaign, she was a grandmother in her late sixties. She had earned her wrinkles, but, notwithstanding innuendos from the Trump campaign, there were no serious questions about her health. Other, more vexing problems would stem from the march of the decades. Things that the Clintons had said and done in the 1990s would stick to them, and these things had not aged well.

  Her initial support for the Iraq War was, in part, an outgrowth of Bill Clinton’s policies in the 1990s. Raising the specter of weapons of mass destruction, he had launched air attacks against Iraq. During the 2008 primary campaign, Obama effectively exploited her pro-war vote. Liberal Democrats had not forgotten about it, and they got another reminder of the issue when Obama sent thousands of American troops back to Iraq, this time to fight ISIS.

  Bill Clinton had responded to the high crime rates of the early 1990s by signing a tough crime bill. In 1996, Hillary Clinton defended the bill by highlighting its anti-gang provisions: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”45 Twenty-four years later, many African Americans worried about over-incarceration. In 2016, Black Lives Matter objected to the legacy of the crime bill, as well as the use of terms such as “super-predators.” Protesters from the group tried to disrupt one of Bill Clinton’s campaign speeches for his wife, and he responded by talking over them loudly. He soon voiced regret for what he had done. “I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.”46 Compare that incident with his “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992, when he gained ground by sticking to his criticism of the rapper’s inflammatory language. By this time, the issue context had changed, and, just as important, the Democratic electorate had changed.

  The scandals stuck, too. In 2015, journalist Jonathan Chait recalled the “Clinton fatigue” of the 1990s: “After an exuberant election swept a young new Democratic president into power in 1992 after a long period of Republican rule, and a somewhat joyless reelection trudge four years later, by the seventh year of the Clinton administration ennui had set in among the base.” He noted polling data that Americans had tired of the Clintons’ ethics problems. In the years following her tenure at the State Department, there were new stories about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation and her questionable use of a private email server for official business. Chait continued: “Those narratives feed into long-standing ethical concerns dating from the Clinton administration and the Clinton post-presidency, during which the former president profited immensely from relationships with figures who had a clear interest in currying favor, then or in the future, with his wife.”47

  With the Clintons, the past was never dead. It wasn’t even past.

  BERNIE

  Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders was five years older than Hillary Clinton, and he looked every day of it. Not only was he an old man from a small state, but he also embraced a label that would have been a lethal epithet a couple of decades earlier. In his book Our Revolution, he described his political education at the University of Chicago’s library. “It was there that I was first exposed to The Nation, Monthly Review, The Progressive magazine, and other progressive publications.”48 There he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, and from then on, he always identified himself as a democratic socialist.

  If the passage of time was a problem for Clinton, it was an asset for Bernie Sanders. For more than a century, social scientists had been asking why socialism had never taken root in the United States. They had various answers, but one was the anti-communism that heated up after the Second World War. Our foe called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so it was natural to assume a link between socialism and communism. The Soviet Union closed for business on Christmas Day 1991, but memories of Soviet communism were still fresh in 1992, and Republican operatives tried
to make an issue of Bill Clinton’s student trip to Moscow. By 2016, the Cold War was a memory that younger voters did not share. For much of the electorate, socialism had lost its taint and the Great Recession had raised doubts about capitalism. In one survey, 57 percent of Democratic primary voters said that socialism has a “positive impact on society.”49 Granted, the sponsor of this survey was a right-leaning group, but other surveys aligned with the finding. An Iowa poll found that 43 percent of Iowa caucus goers would use the term “socialist” to describe themselves.50 A Harvard Institute of Politics poll of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds found that 33 percent supported socialism and 42 percent supported capitalism—a plurality, but a narrow one by American standards.51 “The word ‘capitalism’ doesn’t mean what it used to,” said a Harvard senior who had helped conduct the poll, referring to the 2008 global crisis from which the economy had not fully recovered.52

  Sanders had always been an outsider as well as a socialist. In 1968, he moved to Vermont, bringing his thick Brooklyn accent with him. He worked a variety of jobs, including reporter for several Vermont newspapers, for which he did “man in the street” interviews. “I found that the views of ordinary people, for better or worse, did not necessarily jibe with those of the establishment,” he recalled in his book. “I was surprised by the kind of support that George Wallace was generating.”53 In 1972, he ran in a special election for the Senate as the candidate of the small, left-wing Liberty Union Party. He got 2 percent in that election and 1 percent as the party’s gubernatorial candidate several months later. After a couple of other losing third-party races statewide, he ran as an independent for mayor of Burlington in 1981. With a margin of just ten votes, he gained some national publicity by becoming the only socialist mayor in the United States. Despite opposition from Republican and Democratic politicians alike, he built a creditable record in city government. He also made attention-getting trips to the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Marxist-controlled Nicaragua.

  In 1990, following eight years as mayor and unsuccessful races for governor and Congress, he won a U.S. House seat as an independent. Days after arriving on Capitol Hill, he cast his first important vote, in opposition to the Gulf War. Eleven years later, he voted against the Iraq War, a stand that would serve him well during the nomination contest against Hillary Clinton. He served in the House until 2006, when he won the first of his two terms in the United States Senate. Though he caucused with Democrats in both chambers, he always made a point of running as an independent. By traditional standards, his independent status should have hindered any race for a major-party presidential nomination. But as five-time party switcher Donald Trump showed on the Republican side, voters in the 2016 cycle did not care about the party loyalty of the people who sought to lead their parties.54 If anything, they saw this distance from the parties as an asset.

  On December 10, 2010, Sanders dramatized his independence and captured the imagination of liberals. In opposition to a tax deal between President Obama and Republican congressional leaders, Sanders gave a floor speech that lasted eight and a half hours, the longest in seven years. “The rich get richer,” he said. “The middle class shrinks. Not enough, not enough. The very rich seem to want more and more and more, and they are prepared to dismantle the existing political and social order in order to get it.”55 The speech drew so many viewers that it briefly crashed the Senate video server. It lit up Twitter, spiked the number of pageviews on his Senate website, and immediately doubled his number of Facebook friends. In 2011, Nation Books published the text as a book titled The Speech.56 The old man was a multimedia hit.

  Sanders did not challenge President Obama’s reelection in 2012. As attention turned to the 2016 race, however, he disliked what he saw. “Did I believe that the same old establishment politics and establishment economics, as represented by Hillary Clinton, could effectively address these crises? No, I didn’t.” When it was clear that Elizabeth Warren would not run, he asked himself another question: “Was there a better potential progressive candidate out there than me? Probably not.”57

  THE ALSO-RANS

  A couple of Democrats might have answered “Me, me!” to Sanders’s rhetorical question. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was the son of Republican Senator John Chafee, and upon the elder Chafee’s death in 1999, the state’s GOP governor appointed him to the seat. He won a full term as a Republican, only to lose a reelection bid in 2006. In 2008, he ran for governor as an independent, and eventually became a Democrat. He had a degree of independence from the party system, but his unusual policy positions (e.g., advocacy of the metric system) and flaky persona—more P. G. Wodehouse than Saul Alinsky—never caught on.

  Martin O’Malley, with a liberal record as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland, initially seemed like a more plausible candidate. As he termed out of the governorship in 2014, however, state voters soured on his record and chose a Republican successor. His record in Baltimore was another problem. The classic television series The Wire, set in Baltimore, featured a mayor based on O’Malley—and the portrayal was harsh.58 Nobody who connected the fictional Tommy Carcetti to the actual Martin O’Malley would want to vote for such a shifty and manipulative political insider. In the spring of 2015, reality sealed his political fate when Baltimore broke out in riots that laid bare the city’s social and governmental dysfunction.

  Jim Webb, who had served one term in the Senate from Virginia, was an intriguing candidate. At a time when the political class was short on military experience, Webb was a graduate of the Naval Academy and a decorated Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. (Webb had a featured place in Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song, a best-selling book about prominent Naval Academy graduates.) He went on to write several novels, as well as a nonfiction book about the Scots-Irish in America. As a Republican, he served in the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of defense and secretary of the Navy. He later broke with the GOP over both the Gulf War and the Iraq War, and in 2006 ran as a Democrat against incumbent Senator George Allen of Virginia. He won, and Democrats immediately picked the antiwar war hero to deliver their official response to President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union.

  After voluntarily leaving the Senate in 2012, he began eying the White House. Although liberals liked his dovish stance on foreign policy, his conservative positions on gun control, immigration, and the environment were repulsive to them. A writer for Mother Jones put it this way: “Webb used his six years in the US Senate to stand in the way of Democratic efforts to combat climate change. Virginia, after all, is a coal state, and Webb regularly stood up for the coal industry, earning the ire of environmentalists.”59 And on issues of race, class, and identity, he was out of step with his party. At the National Press Club, he talked about forgotten Americans, including ghetto kids, but also addressed what would become Trump Country:

  Or if you’re a kid growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Clay County Kentucky, by most accounts the poorest county in America, which also happens to be 98 percent white, surrounded by poverty, drug abuse and joblessness, and you leave your home in order to succeed, and when you do you are welcomed with the cynical, unbelieving stares and whispers of an America that no longer understands your cultural journey, and policies that can exclude you from a fair shot at education and employment with the false premise that if you are white you by definition have begun with some kind of socioeconomic advantage, what are you going to think about the so-called fairness of your own government?60

  One could speculate that the general election might have taken a different turn if Democrats had nominated someone who could talk that way—and whose combat record would have enabled him to stare down Trump on national security issues. As with the outcome of a Biden candidacy, the question will remain open. If the Democratic primary electorate had looked like the one that nominated Bill Clinton in 1992, Webb might have had a chance.

  But it did not, and Webb never got traction. When asked in an October debate which enemy they wer
e proudest of, Clinton and O’Malley listed the National Rifle Association, from whom Webb had a 92 percent positive rating; Webb cited the North Vietnamese soldier whom he killed in combat. His valor may have earned him the Silver Star, but his answer earned him a heaping of abuse from the alt-left. He left the race, concluding that the Democratic Party was not a fit for him.61

  CLINTON VERSUS SANDERS

  Hillary Clinton had entered the 2008 nomination race as the odds-on favorite. Her loss was searing but educational, and as she looked ahead to 2016, she set about to do several things differently. “In 2008 they didn’t understand the delegate fight anywhere near the way that the Obama team did,” one Democratic consultant told journalist Chris Cillizza. “This time [campaign manager] Robby [Mook] and team knew exactly what they needed to do to get the delegates they needed.”62

  First, she would not forget the caucus states. Assuming that primaries were the main event of 2008, the Clinton campaign failed to put enough money and labor into the caucuses, which ended up providing Obama with an edge. Indeed, as Clinton campaign chair John Podesta wrote in a leaked email, some in the Clinton camp still believed years later that “the Obama forces flooded the caucuses with ineligible voters.”63 Her campaign would spend considerable time and resources on the caucus states, which she started visiting as soon as she was in the race.