With Martin O'Malley throwing his hat in the ring, we now have three declared Democratic candidates and two more possible candidates. While both Bernie Sanders and Mr. O'Malley have created a lot of buzz, Ms. Clinton has not done anything that would cause her to stumble, while Lincoln Chafee is about to throw his hat in the ring and Jim Webb is having trouble getting off the ground as of this writing.
Our rank of the candidates, in order of how well they are doing at this point.
Hillary Clinton:
Hillary Clinton, like her husband Bill, is like teflon -- the more the right attacks her, the more she rises in the polls. The Clinton Cash book did not affect her standings in the polls against the Republican candidates; if anything, it allowed people to take a look at the activities that the Clinton Foundation does on an ongoing basis. In short, Bill has never really stopped being President; his life work is to make lives better for all around the world similar to what Jimmy Carter has done.
The problem is that while the economy is much better than what it was when President Obama took office, we are essentially in a jobless recovery, with an obstructionist and backwards-thinking House, Senate, and Supreme Court hindering the way to peace, prosperity, and universal employment. More and more people are dropping out of the workforce due to not being able to find work. The Clinton camp is making no secret of what it wants to do -- fight the battle on pocketbook issues of concern to most Americans.
On Thursday, some of Hillary Clinton’s top campaign officials held a briefing for about three dozen members of the 2016 hack pack. Their message was a positive one. “The view inside the campaign is that voters are concerned about kitchen-table issues Clinton wants to talk about, rather than media reports and Republican attacks on the [Clinton] foundation, the officials said,” Vox’s Jonathan Allen reported. “There’s no conflict between her promise to represent ‘everyday Americans’ and the access big donors have had to Clinton and her husband over the years, they said, arguing that voters will trust her to represent them in the White House.”
That was partly spin, of course. There is no end in sight to the stories about the finances of the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton e-mails, or the activities of some of the Clintons’ associates. But as spring rolls into summer, Team Brooklyn has successfully accomplished its two initial goals: heading off the possibility of a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination and surviving a barrage of negative publicity that was inevitable at some stage, and which was, therefore, best confronted early on.
One reason they have withstood the barrage of negative press and attacks is that people simply don't care about the guilt by association card of "Clinton Cash." They care much more about pocketbook issues that affect their daily lives. And attacking Ms. Clinton based on her personal wealth means nothing to a lot of people --
Eleanor Clift notes that FDR was one of the wealthiest Americans of his time and that didn't stop him from lifting millions of of poverty and despair.
Bernie Sanders:
Bernie Sanders is on a roll, rising in the polls, drawing large crowds, and, as the NYT notes, drawing older people -- the most likely to vote -- into the process. He is polling higher on the Democratic side than any of the GOP candidates are on the Republican side. Mr. Sanders has much less political baggage than Ms. Clinton, meaning that Chuck Todd and his GOP allies will have to stretch to find anything. If a 40-year-old essay that was poorly written and that Sanders is man enough to face up to and recant is all that his attackers have on him, they will have a hard time should he win the primary.
The New York Times can be a barometer to how a person or organization's fortunes are. At the end of last year, with the Yankees out of the running for a wild card, the Times did several different articles on the Royals, who were in the process of clinching their first playoff berth since 1985. All of a sudden, it was cool to be a Royals fan, after having endured 20 years of losing baseball. The Times has always been a staunch anti-Communist publication, even going so far as to claim (without justification) that the Soviet government was about to topple in 1920; they have never been a fan of socialism. But given their recent positive coverage of Bernie Sanders, all of a sudden, it is cool to be a socialist again.
Martin O'Malley:
While both Mr. Sanders and Mr. O'Malley have created a lot of buzz and have a lot of similar themes, Bernie Sanders jumped into the ring earlier and thus has more momentum than O'Malley at this point. Both of them are campaigning on similar themes; both are running to the left of Ms. Clinton and seeking to tap into the populist anger that people have at the system.
The big disadvantage that Ms. Clinton has is that there is little upside potential for her; nearly everyone in this country knows who she is, meaning many people have already made up their minds on her for good or bad. O'Malley, however, polling in low single digits, has nowhere to go but up. And he is seeking to get under the skins of Hillary's and Bernie's supporters. Editor and co-publisher Sarah Jones of the website PoliticusUSA ripped O'Malley for this remark:
O’Malley announced his candidacy on Saturday by repeating a Republican claim against Hillary Clinton, “Recently, the CEO of Goldman Sachs let his employees know that he’d be just fine with either Bush or Clinton. Well, I’ve got news for the bullies of Wall Street—the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.”
Wall Street aside, because who doesn’t agree that they’ve been bullies and some among them have been grossly incompetent to boot, it’s the crown to be passed between two royal families that I have such a problem with.
This claim that Hillary Clinton is the same as Jeb Bush is helpful only to other Republicans in the primary race, Jeb Bush, and the Republican establishment who seek to mitigate the branding harm of his last name.
On Mr. Sanders, O'Malley claimed that he had a track record for getting things done, while Bernie did not.
This, too, was rebutted by PoliticusUSA:
If Martin O’Malley thinks that Bernie Sanders is all talk, America’s veterans have a few points that they would like to make. It was a Bernie Sanders bill that reformed veterans’ health care last year. Bernie Sanders played a critical role as Chairman of the Senate’s Veterans Affairs Committee, the legislative response to the VA crisis.
On Saturday, the Postal Service backed off of a plan to close 82 more mail processing plants thanks to pressure from Sen. Sanders.
Bernie Sanders did more yesterday at the federal level than O’Malley has done in his entire career.
To be fair, I would give my Senator, Claire McCaskill, props on the Postal Service plan as well; she has been out in front on this issue for the last few years.
Lincoln Chafee:
Chafee is expected to throw his hat in the ring next week. He seeks to follow President Obama's lead and make Iraq an issue against Ms. Clinton. He also seeks to make the Clinton Cash affair an issue in the primaries.
Mr. Chafee, who likes to point out that he was the only Republican senator to vote against authorizing the invasion in Iraq, signaled his interest in running for president last month. He has said that Mrs. Clinton’s vote to authorize the war remained a relevant issue and he raised questions about donations made to the Clinton Foundation.
The problem is that he doesn't have the buzz that Mr. O'Malley or Mr. Sanders have, and he was ousted in 2006 over Iraq, along with several other Republicans. So, there is a limit on how far he can go on hanging Iraq like an albatross over Ms. Clinton's head.
Jim Webb:
James Webb is seeking to capitalize on the populist anger that Mr. O'Malley and Mr. Sanders are, and to bring in the Reagan Democrats like he did when he successfully ran for Senate in 2006. He will likely tout his foreign policy experience, such as his opposition to Iraq, along with the fact that he warned about the mess in the South China Sea well before it happened.
Unfortunately, he is having trouble even getting his campaign off the ground, seeing that his Iowa field director and another operative have abruptly quit his operation. And the fact that he appears on FOX News (was with Shannon Bream today at 1:15 ET) and the fact that he would advocate sanctions and a more hawkish policy on China than the White House might not sit well with a war-weary public or the Democratic base.