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Krauthammer: Clinton should've played it to the center

Charles Krauthammer | Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist based at the Washington Post

May 9, 2008

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By the time Hillary Clinton figured out how to beat Barack Obama, it was too late. When she began the race in 2007 thinking she was in for a coronation, she claimed the center to position herself for the general election. She simply assumed the party activists and loony left would fall in behind her.

However, as Obama began to rise, she scurried left, particularly with her progressively more explicit renunciation of the Iraq war. It was a fool's errand. She would never be able to erase the stain of her original war vote and she remained unwilling to do an abject John Edwards self-flagellating recantation. It took her weeks even to approximate the apology the left was looking for, and by then the party's activist wing was unbreakably betrothed to Obama.

But going left proved disastrous for Clinton. It abolished all significant policy differences between her and Obama, the National Journal's most liberal senator for 2007. On health care, for example, her attempts to turn a minor difference in the definition of universality into a major assault on Obama fell flat. With no important policy differences separating them, the contest became one of character and personality. Matched against this elegant, intellectually nimble, hugely talented newcomer, she had no chance.

She tried everything. Her charges that he was a man of nothing but words came off as a petulant attack on eloquence. The power to inspire may not be sufficient to qualify for the presidency, but it is hardly a liability. She tried a silly plagiarism charge, then settled for the experience card. In a change election, this was not a brilliant strategy. It forced her to dwell on the 1990s, playing candidate of the past to Obama's candidate of the future. Her studied attempts to embellish her experience led her into a thicket of confabulated Bosnian sniper fire.

It wasn't until late in the fourth quarter that she figured out the seam in Obama's defense. In fact, Obama handed her the playbook with Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Michelle Obama's comments about never having been proud of America and his own guns-and-God condescension toward small-town whites.

Clinton finally understood the way to run against Obama: back to the center -- not ideologically but culturally, not on policy but on attitude. She changed none of her positions on Iraq or Iran or health care or taxes. Instead, she transformed herself into working-class Sally-get-her-gun, off duck hunting with dad.

The gas tax holiday was never an economic or policy issue. It was meant to position her culturally. It heightened her identification with her white working-class constituency. Obama played his part by citing economists in opposing it. That completed her narrative: He had the professors on his side; she had the single moms seeking relief.

It was an overreach. It not only deflected attention away from the amazing Rev. Wright at the height of his spectacular return. It also never played as the elitist-vs.-working-folk issue she had hoped, because it isn't just economists who know the gas tax holiday is nothing but a cheap gimmick. Ordinary folks do too. And the gas tax idea had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing Hillary's main character liability: cynical Washington pol willing to do or say anything to win votes. The lightness in Hillary's step in the days before Indiana and North Carolina reflected the relief of the veteran politician who, after months of treading water, finally finds the right campaign strategy. But it was far too late. And the gas tax overkill, one final error of modulation, sealed the deal -- for Obama.

There's only one remaining chapter in this fascinating spectacle: negotiating the terms of Clinton's surrender. After which we will have six months of watching her enthusiastically stumping the country for Obama, denying with utter conviction Republican charges that he is the out of touch, latte-sipping elitist she warned Democrats against so urgently in the last, late leg of her doomed campaign.

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