Thursday, April 16, 2015

5:44 PM

By Unknown

In: , , ,

No comments

Hillary Clinton Re-emerges, by Design (but Also by Surprise) - New York Times




Hillary Rodham Clinton posed for photos as she left the Iowa Statehouse on Wednesday. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Did you hear the one about the presidential candidate who walks into a Chipotle restaurant in Ohio? She orders a burrito bowl and makes headlines worldwide.


If you did not get the joke, you might not be a student of Hillary Rodham Clinton, perhaps one of the most overly cautious and controlled politicians of the modern era.


The punch line: After 25 years in the public eye, Mrs. Clinton has suddenly developed the capacity to surprise.


Cable television has not been able to get enough of Mrs. Clinton this week, treating her pit stops and political events in the Midwest like breaking news that requires hours of after-action analysis. Everyday-American Hillary has felt like a cultural phenomenon at times — not so much as hope-and-change Barack Obama became in 2007 and 2008, but far more than she ever was during their fight for the Democratic nomination.



One factor is that Mrs. Clinton has hired some of the best brains from Mr. Obama’s operation for her own and appears to be blending their creativity with her ideas on travel logistics and campaign events that are geared more toward voters than the news media circus.






Paths to the Presidency: What Hillary Clinton Would Need to Do to Win


Among the Obama aides who have joined her team are Teddy Goff, who worked for Mr. Obama in the 2008 campaign and was his digital director for the 2012 election. Mr. Goff, a 29-year-old who has earned praise for his instincts about what online material will go viral, was one of several architects of the video Mrs. Clinton released on Sunday, which has received high marks from many Democrats and some Republicans for its focus on everyday Americans getting ready for changes.


Mr. Goff’s squad of digital experts shot the video, and he worked on it closely with Mrs. Clinton’s media adviser, Jim Margolis, and her senior strategist, Joel Benenson, who are also veterans of the Obama operation, as well as with Mrs. Clinton’s longtime media consultant Mandy Grunwald.


In other words, Mrs. Clinton turned over the video — her all-important first attempt at reintroducing herself as a political figure — to a team including three people with whom she had never worked before. It was a display of trust and a desire for new thinking, including giving herself the room to roam conceptually, that she has not shown in a meaningful way since her first campaign for the Senate, in 2000.


“Her loss in the 2008 campaign really liberated her in the end: to be less guarded, to try new things, to just put herself out there more for people to see, for better or for worse,” said Geoff Garin, Mrs. Clinton’s political strategist in the final months of her first presidential race. “She’s starting now with that same kind of liberation, and she has a team who knows how to work with it.”




Hillary Rodham Clinton’s advisers, from left, Huma Abedin and Jim Margolis, watched their candidate Wednesday in Iowa. Doug Mills/The New York Times

(The rollout was not without a hitch: Mrs. Clinton, who was criticized in the 2008 campaign for claiming, inaccurately, that she had dodged sniper fire in Bosnia, said on the second day of her Iowa visit that all of her grandparents were immigrants. According to a BuzzFeed report, only one of them was — her grandfather Hugh Rodham Sr.)


While some aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign reboot have seemed more spontaneous than might be expected of a politician with Secret Service protection, others are the product of prodigious planning.


Roughly three weeks ago, Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager — who was an operative in her 2008 campaign but is not a longtime Clinton hand — started holding a nightly meeting of aides to figure out the mechanics of the rollout of her candidacy.


Mrs. Clinton had chosen to visit Iowa first, according to numerous people working with the campaign, as a way to conquer whatever demons remained from her loss there to Mr. Obama.






Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)?


But at a meeting to discuss the dates and times, Mrs. Clinton surprised her aides by announcing, “I want to drive there,” her longtime aide Huma Abedin recalled Monday afternoon on a conference call with top donors.


“Seriously?” Ms. Abedin recalled saying in disbelief.


“Seriously,” Mrs. Clinton replied, Ms. Abedin told the donors.


She explained that driving would allow her to stop and meet people, and to arrive in Iowa in low-key fashion, according to two people briefed on the discussions. The alternative — descending from a plane, like a visiting dignitary — could play into Republican suggestions that Democrats were holding more of a coronation than a nominating contest.



Stopping at Chipotle, however, was not chewed over in advance, a senior campaign aide said.


The Iowa campaign events held fewer surprises, and were closer to Mrs. Clinton’s comfort zone: talking about policy (education on Tuesday, business and economic issues on Wednesday) with small groups of people whose concerns matched up with hers.


Yet because the gatherings were intended to be small, some Iowa Democrats were disappointed to miss meeting her.


“I expected her to at least greet a crowd of people or find a way to welcome a big group of well-wishers, but the campaign told us that they didn’t want anything looking like a rally,” said Arlie Willems, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Jones County, where Mrs. Clinton held Tuesday’s event at a community college.


Whether Mrs. Clinton can continue to surprise when the events become larger and the klieg lights grow hotter is an open question. “The style of campaigning and message will be tested over time, but the tone and humility of the launch has been very much what she needed to do,” said David Axelrod, a longtime adviser to Mr. Obama and an architect of his presidential campaigns.


It also remains to be seen, given Mrs. Clinton’s influences and coterie of advisers, whom she will take after more: Mr. Obama, or another phenom of modern-day political history.


David Winston, a Republican pollster, said Mrs. Clinton this week called to mind the Bill Clinton of 1991 and 1992, when one of his presidential campaign slogans was “Putting People First.”


“Her 2008 campaign was so much about her — ‘Let’s start a conversation. Don’t you want to talk about me?’ — and now it’s ‘Let’s talk about you,’ ” Mr. Winston said. “That may surprise people, but the challenge will be how close she wants to be identified with President Obama. She has a lot of Obama people on her team. She was in his administration. But she can create distance from him? That would be very hard, and surprising.”



Follow The New York Times Politics section on Twitter and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter .











Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1DaIg53

0 comments:

Post a Comment