Yes, Hillary Clinton is in pretty good shape right now, judging by the polls and pundits. And Trump is his own worst enemy, so far running the worst campaign I’ve ever witnessed — and I remember Goldwater!
I’m not complacent, though, and I hope Hillary and her advisors aren’t either. They need to take Trump seriously, for a couple of reasons. First, despite Republican disunity, I’m afraid that when push comes to shove, the vast majority of usually Republican voters will end up pulling the lever for Trump, out of both habit and their irrational loathing for Clinton. Second, and this is where the Clinton campaign seems to be missing the boat so far, no matter how flawed Trump is as a candidate, he has successfully positioned himself as the candidate of change; and it seems like a lot of voters, especially independents, think the country is on the wrong track and want an outsider, even a crazy one, to come in and “shake the place up," or even "burn the place down."
Moreover, even though a lot of the Trump voters are wingnuts, racists, xenophobes, etc., there are people who have been left behind and feel betrayed by Obama and the Democrats. Anecdotally, at least, a number of people who voted for Obama are now supporting Trump. And their grievances aren’t entirely imaginary, though they are misplaced. If Clinton were running against a more normal Republican, or if Trump could somehow gain a bit of message discipline (not to mention self-discipline), she could be in trouble. Trump’s best talking points (again, if he were capable of staying on message) are that the economy may be all right for some, but not for the little guy (which is true); that the recovery has been comparatively weak (also true); and that job growth in the abstract is good but that a lot of the new jobs aren’t as good as the ones that were lost (hard to quantify, but it certainly strikes a chord with lots of people who have never recovered their economic footing since the Bush depression). Therefore, Trump argues, we need to change economic policies in order to create more robust growth; and it is highly unlikely that Clinton, who has been a Washington insider for almost 30 years, will make the bold changes necessary to get things back on track.
This is, I’m afraid, an effective message with undecided voters. Don't get me wrong, I strongly disagree with the conclusion, but there is some truth to the diagnosis. In fact, Hillary rhetorically agrees with a lot of the observations about the economy, and has detailed plans to fix it. But the problem is that to many jaded voters, they’ve heard it all before, and they do not view her as a credible messenger. And that's where the Clinton campaign seems to be missing the boat. They need to explain why in fact she is the candidate most likely to accomplish positive economic change.
The answer seems simple to me. Instead of focusing all of her fire on Trump, she needs to attack the Republicans in general, especially the do-nothing Republican Congress. (Shades of Harry Truman.) Yes, the recovery is weaker than it should be (though still far superior to the Bush catastrophe), but that’s because the Republicans have blocked everything Obama and the Democrats tried to do to make it better. I’m too lazy to compile a list and don’t remember everything, but I know off the top of my head that the Republicans blocked infrastructure spending, the proposed infrastructure bank, various tax proposals designed to stop US companies from outsourcing jobs, and numerous other beneficial proposals. (It would be great if someone else with more time compiles a list for us.) The Republicans threatened to default on the national debt, which did further damage to the economy. They shut down the government, which did even more harm. They refused to extend unemployment benefits and blocked Medicaid expansion in red states. They tried to prevent Obama’s rescue of the auto industry. Their objections and opposition led to the stimulus bill being smaller than it should have been, and overly-weighted to tax cuts. By focusing on the deficit (only when a Democrat is in office, by the way), they prevented the Government from borrowing at historically low interest rates, in order to fund infrastructure, clean energy, and other economically beneficial investments. All of these actions had an adverse effect on the recovery.
Not to mention, the Republicans are wrong about the economy, every time. They said the Bush tax cuts would jumpstart the economy and pay for themselves. Instead, they caused red ink as far as the eye can see. They said Obamacare would kill jobs. Instead, there has been private sector job growth going on seven years. Going way back, they said that Bill Clinton’s tax increases would cause a recession. Instead, the economy was the best it's ever been, in living memory.
Clinton needs to trumpet this message, again and again. True, she throws in a line or two about trickle down economics in her stump speech, but that’s not enough. She needs to be specific, listing these and all the other examples of Republican economic malpractice. She needs to be more partisan, not less — she needs to spell out exactly how disastrous Republican economic policies are for ordinary working class and middle class people. She needs to specifically tie our continuing economic problems and weakness, and the continuing gridlock in Washington, which voters hate, to Republican obstruction in Congress.
This will have several salutary effects. First, it gives her campaign a coherent narrative framework, so she can tie together seemingly disparate problems and make voters realize that they are all related and all share the same solution — a vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. Second, as just mentioned, it helps not just Hillary, but down-ballot Democrats as well. And this plays into the third benefit. If the Democrats don’t succeed in flipping the Senate and House, it's likely to be more of the same (still better than President Trump, but not very inspiring), and all of Clinton’s great programs and policies will never see the light of day. To the extent she can educate the public as to the real problem in Washington — the Republican party, not just Trump — she lays the groundwork for future progress as well.
Take a lesson from Reagan. As Obama said, it’s no accident that Reagan was a consequential President -- that is, he shaped political debate in our country for the last 30-odd years. He did it by having a simple story, a framework, and sticking to it. In virtually every speech he talked about getting government out of the way so the private sector could get on with building a laissez-faire utopia; about the do-gooder Democrats giving away money earned by the hard working middle class to lazy, shiftless minorities. It was utter bullshit, of course, but a lot a people believed it and it shaped our political discourse for a generation.
Even Bill Clinton, gifted as he was politically, didn’t attempt to change the big picture painted by Reagan. Instead, he bought into a lot of this framing and tried to triangulate. That may or may not have been the right thing to do then, it certainly isn’t now. We have a once in a generation opportunity -- given to us by the crazy Republican primary voters — to reshape the narrative for years to come. This would go a long way to reshaping some of the negative perceptions about Hillary as well. It's a simple and effective narrative framework that can downplay her perceived wonky, awkward style. And we have the added benefit of our story being true.