Well, obviously James Carville is back in the game! And things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.
Bill and Hill have taken charge of the campaign as reported in The NYTimes and The Washington Post this morning. Along with unnamed advisors from the old team (Carville) they are taking control of strategy and the daily message. And today’s message was “the woman question.” So Hillary had her “female moment” and then later in the day a young 21-year old yelled out “iron my shirt” and held up a sign with that ridiculous slogan. Obviously, this has been coordinated. So everyone today is talking about Hillary and the female moment and it is being played non-stop on every single liberal and conservative station. Today it was a Hillary day. Not much new news from Obama today. Did it work? Yes! Will it matter? Who knows.
The moment was brilliant. The woman (a plant?) asked who does her hair. Hill got to attack the media for always showing her on her worst days, to show how personal this is for her, and she hit every single one of her strategic campaign points in the answer, and she beautifully sustained the emotion through her entire answer so that the clip in its entirety is being played on every single station in America today.
I am not attacking Hillary or playing the gender card. The phrase is not mine: it comes from the blogs on the Times and the Post. This is brilliant politics. This is what we've been waiting for. The Clintons getting back to the business of media politics. We can see now how rusty they've been for the past year.
What has been missing from the Clinton campaign so far has been images. They seem to have forgotten that presidential politics is about creating images, which is one of the reasons, obviously not the main reason, why Obama has been doing so well. And what we got today was a powerful image of Hillary, the woman.
It's sort of astonishing, if you think about it, that there hasn't been much discussion about Hillary possibly being the first woman president - and that's no doubt because people see her as "Hillary" before they see her as a woman. By that I mean that she is already so famous, already such a world-historical figure, already such a large part of our political consciousness that the fact that she would be breaking a gender barrier hasn't really registed. And the two moments today were meant to forcefully remind us of the fact of her sex.
And they follow up directly on the point she made in the debate on Saturday night about how she embodies change by possibly being the first woman president.
The Clintons have also rememered, finally, that presidental politics is all about culture and igniting cultural change - another aspect where Obama had far outpaced them. So they will now re-orient a segment of the discussion to the woman question - and probably try to make the case that the general electorate will accept a woman president before it accepts a black president - I realize this is a controversial thing to say, but I believe part of the new strategy will be to ignite just that kind of controversial discussion. And in any case, it has so far been rejected by the electorate.