Hillary Has Her Running Mate: Obama The president is free to be Clinton’s designated partisan attack dog.By Juan Williams
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-has-her-running-mate-obama-1450828750
The 2016 presidential race will be defined by the relationship between two titans of American politics: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. For the first time in more than two decades—since President Reagan campaigned with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush—an incumbent two-term president will be an active player in the campaign and possibly even an active presence at events.
Right now, President Obama is free to be the designated partisan attack dog for Mrs. Clinton, allowing her to remain above the nastiness likely to arise in a race with a sharply divided electorate. Bill Clinton has played that role for her in past races. This time Mr. Obama’s presence allows Mr. Clinton, with his high poll numbers, to lead a chorus of nostalgia-stirring reminders of good feelings about the last time a Clinton was in the White House.
The Obama team is already backing her. John Podesta, Mr. Obama’s former adviser, runs her campaign. President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, once a Hillary Clinton critic, is now supporting her, writing Oct. 24 on Medium.com that, “She’s the right person to protect President Obama’s legacy.”
The Clinton team needs Mr. Obama to turn out the vote among young people and minorities: “President Obama has both the unique ability and unique credibility to frame the stakes in the race that will be motivating to Democrats,” Geoffrey Garin, a pollster advising Mrs. Clinton’s super PAC, told Bloomberg in October.
Watching their current embrace it is easy to forget that in the 2008 race for the Democratic nomination, the two were rivals. Mr. Obama took swipes at Mrs. Clinton, for instance by calling her “likable enough” in a debate, and chiding her for being on the Wal-Mart board of directors. Mrs. Clinton famously mocked him as naïve for promising transformative change, characterizing the idea as “the skies will open, the light will come down . . . and the world will be perfect!”
Meanwhile, Republicans are already stirring their base voters by attacking Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy as essentially seeking an Obama third term. “As the chief architect of President Obama’s foreign policy,” the Republican National Committee’s Allison Moore said in a Dec. 15 statement, “Hillary Clinton has seen her tenure as Secretary of State go from being a chief qualification for the presidency to a huge political liability, particularly when it comes to the issue of counterterrorism.”
Candidate Clinton’s strategic relationship with the incumbent president of her own party stands in contrast to recent elections. In 2008 the Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin chose to distance itself from two-term incumbent Republican President George W. Bush.
In 2000 the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Al Gore, and Democrats running down-ballot nationwide sought to distance themselves from incumbent two-term President Bill Clinton. Despite his impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, Mr. Clinton remained personally popular, with a 65% approval rating, according to the last Gallup poll of his administration. Yet Mr. Gore regarded him as radioactive for moderate and conservative voters, particularly in the South and Midwest.
Fifteen years later, Mrs. Clinton is trying to strike a delicate balance. She needs President Obama’s supporters at the polls on election day. But she is taking great care to assert her independence from him, particularly on foreign affairs, where President Obama has weak poll numbers.
Thus her implied distance from the president when she said at Saturday night’s Democratic debate: “I have a plan that I’ve put forward to go after ISIS, not to contain them but to defeat them.” While echoing the president’s refusal to send thousands of troops into the Middle East, she is also taking more-hawkish positions by advocating a no-fly zone over Syria and the deployment of more U.S. special-operations forces.
The strategy appears to be working. A November ABC/Washington Post poll found that Mrs. Clinton is more trusted than any Republican to handle terrorism. That poll indicates that voters are willing to judge President Obama’s first secretary of state as capable of developing her own policies on dealing with terror.
In reality, the differences between the current president and the aspiring one are not large. Generally, Mrs. Clinton stands with Mr. Obama on the concept of “smart power” and the idea that the U.S. should act chiefly in coalition with other nations. She, like him, also backs accepting refugees from Syria, overall immigration reform and gun control.
Yet Mrs. Clinton keeps asserting her independence. “I’m not running for my husband’s third term. I’m not running for President Obama’s third term,” she told late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert on Oct. 27. “I’m running for my first term.”
Even so, when a Democratic debate moderator asked her in October to “name the one way that your administration would not be a third term of President Obama,” Mrs. Clinton avoided policy detail: “Well, I think that’s pretty obvious,” she responded. “I think being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had up until this point, including President Obama.”
That evasive answer demonstrates the conflicting desire of the Clinton campaign to keep some distance from the president even as she signals to his supporters that she remains close to him.
For both politicians, the relationship is transactional. Mr. Obama gets a successor who will defend his already much-debated legacy and fight to protect his signature accomplishments on health care, Wall Street and student-loan reform.
In exchange, Mrs. Clinton gets the best advocate to fire up the Democratic base and pull it to the polls in November in the numbers she needs to become the first female president of the United States.
The downside to this strategy is that today’s polarizing president could turn out more Republicans than Democrats next year.
Mr. Williams, a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill, is the author of “Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate” (Crown, 2011).
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