“I stand between you and the apocalypse.” — Hillary Clinton, during a private fundraiser at Stephen Spielberg’s East Hampton compound, according to The New York Times.
We had a little charity payoff function the other night.
I debated, in a loose conversational fashion that was mostly audience-dominated, the Arkansas chairman of the Donald Trump campaign, former U.S. attorney Bud Cummins. This was for the entertainment if not edification of 10 geriatric liberal males who had made a generous live-auction pledge to the Arkansas Prostate Cancer Foundation for a private dinner and the privilege.
In a perhaps controversial journalistic concession, I told Cummins I’d keep the discussion off-the-record to facilitate candor and out of respect for the charitable, not political, purpose of the event.
I will say that Cummins gave as good as he got, more civilly than his interrogators at times, such as when one of the liberal curmudgeons corrected his pronunciation of Iraq.
And he really didn’t say anything unsuitable for public consumption. But a deal is a deal.
By the way, Cummins is now on his way to Washington to work for his old U.S. attorney pal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, on Trump’s transition team.
Meantime, I can freely tell my part of the charity evening, such as when a former Arkansas judge asked me what to expect from Hillary Clinton’s first 100 days as president.
Not a lot of emailing, I’ll wager.
My answer was the truth, which is that I had no good idea.
The fact is that Clinton’s campaign is not about any clear vision or compelling policy message, which is problematic.
Please understand that she has an abundance of perfectly fine, center-left, many-pointed and incrementally Bernie-esque policy proposals.
One, for example, is to help with college debt. During the primary she wanted to tinker with renegotiating interest rates, limiting debt payments to a percentage of income, deferring debt for three years for startup entrepreneurs and giving tax credits to employers who have debt-reduction assistance as part of an employee benefits package.
Only when trying to buy Bernie Sanders’ support at the convention did she go along in platform committee hearings with free college tuition for students from families with incomes of less than $125,000.
Notice that she started out incrementally, then moved toward Bernie out of duress, then stopped short of Bernie. That’s not compelling; it’s fluid and tactical.
For another example, she doesn’t want to go to single-payer on health insurance. Nor does she want to repeal and replace Obamacare. Instead she wants to keep Obamacare but change it, primarily by adding a “public option” through which something like Medicare would be available as an alternative to private insurance in state Obamacare exchanges for persons not yet 65.
Again, she is the candidate of the in-between.
With Bernie, the message clearly was his own, and it was all-in for government health insurance and free college. With Trump, the message is to make America great again, somehow, some way, and get tough with illegal immigrants. Hillary’s message is fluid and incremental and strategic and technical, and perfectly fine as a center-left agenda. But it exists in no simple compelling form.
What ought to be compelling about her candidacy is that she is on the historic precipice of becoming our first woman president. But circumstances have caused her to be defined more as yesterday’s establishment politician-as-usual than pioneering woman.
Her implicit message — the one that is working well enough for a back-door victory — is that she is not Trump.
The New York Times quoted her in that aforementioned quip at a recent rich-donor fundraiser at Stephen Spielberg’s house. She was reported to have amused Jimmy Buffett and Paul McCartney, et al., by saying, “I stand between you and the apocalypse.”
But will that be good enough?
The latest averaging of the ever-narrowing polls shows her with a four-point national lead when matched head-to-head with Trump. But it shows her losing five points and with a margin of three points when the Libertarian and Green Party candidates are included.
That is to say she goes from leading 46-42 head-to-head to leading 41-38 with the other two candidates in the mix.
What that means is that some people are looking only for someone not Trump and will peel off Hillary when the poll-taker offers a couple of other not-Trump options.
Yes, some peel off Trump, too. Just not as many.
All of that is to say there is peril ahead for Clinton. My predicted 80-day narrative of a tightening race was wrong by about 10 days. The race started tightening at 70 days.
Trump’s great challenge is to appear sufficiently presidential — meaning not outrageous. He is now close enough to make a real race of it if he can survive the three debates.
In those, he must seem presidential enough to persuade a few people who are supporting Hillary only on the basis she is not Donald. He must show them that maybe he’s not as woefully unfit as they thought.
If the race should become more conventional, then attention might turn uncomfortably to Hillary in a two-fold way — to her trustworthiness issues instead of Trump’s irrational ones, and in search of a compelling theme for her presidency that proved beyond my ability to express the other evening.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.