The problems plaguing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid

IT is the question every politician hates. A curly one that none of them want to answer. The T question. What about trust?

Hillary Clinton’s time came exactly a week out from the first votes being cast in the race to the White House. This young millennial voter from Iowa had a question for the frontrunner.

“It feels like there is a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders,” Taylor Gipple said, referencing Clinton’s key opponent for the Democratic nomination.

“And I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest,” he says.
At the mention of the word “dishonest”, Clinton tilts her head, concerned.

Gipple forges on: “But I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

It was in that moment that a young voter cast a spotlight on one of the great questions of the 2016 race to the White House.

Where is the love for Hillary Clinton?

This was meant to be her election. It was hers to lose. And yet, just days away from the first primary votes being cast, she’s in a fight for her political life.

Lack of momentum

It has been dubbed an “enthusiasm gap”, this problem that’s plaguing Hillary Clinton.
In short, Americans aren’t that excited by the former First Lady turned Secretary of State. Although she may still be ahead in national polls, there is a creeping malaise in Clinton’s presidency bid.

In politics, momentum is everything. Take one look at Clinton’s campaign and it clear that while she has many things on her side in this fight, momentum isn’t one of them.

Back in July, when Donald Trump first came on the scene, polling aggregators had Clinton well ahead, at 53 per cent to his 33.

Now, they put Trump in striking distance — at 41 per cent to Clinton’s 44.
The story with her main rival for the Democratic nomination is almost identical.
In July, polls put Clinton at 57 per cent to Bernie Sanders’s 17.

On January 15, that had recalibrated to Clinton at 48 per cent, Sanders at 39.

It’s the very pattern that Clinton’s 2008 demons are made of. It was this time exactly eight years ago that Barack Obama seemed to come from nowhere to beat Clinton in the Iowa primaries. It was then that he stole the march to victory, with Clinton simply unable to recapture momentum.

This gradual creep up of her key opponents comes despite Clinton’s experience meaning that she’s undeniably running a well-oiled campaign machine.

She’s got celebrity endorsements, ample funding, a tightly-run message ship and delivers confident performance after confident performance.

Even at Monday night’s debate, in the face of curly questions like the one from Gipple, Clinton is relaxed, sharp and focused, almost always outshining her rivals.

And yet, she is struggling to maintain a lead in the democrat primaries. As of right now, Clinton still has her neck in front, but the gap is closing.

The old guard

The New York Timesthis week described Clinton has having an “animatronic plasticity”, which it said raised “questions of ambition versus authenticity”.

This idea of Clinton’s fundamental unrelateable-ness is partly the curse of political experience.

Americans have known Hillary Clinton for a long time. They first saw her on the regular back in 1992 as a young mum helping her husband campaign for the nation’s top job.

Later, they knew her as the jilted wife. The Senator. The failed presidential candidate. And finally, as Secretary of State.

This familiarity of Clinton as regular fixture of government brings with it the curse of tying her to the struggles that have plagued everyday Americans over the past two decades.

While Clinton’s years of preparation for the presidency should work in her favour, they have instead meant Americans don’t view her as an exciting candidate who can bring great change and make their nation better.

They believe they already know what she can do. Plus, this history means she’s bound up with baggage: her own, her husband’s and the legacies of the Obama administration.

Clinton’s struggles can be broadly categorised in two ways.

Then, there is that non-tangible problem that’s harder to shake — this fundamental lack of enthusiasm in the electorate and the disdain for her ties to the past.

Clinton is the candidate with all the celebrity endorsements — people like Beyonce, Lena Dunham, Katy Perry, Magic Johnson and the Kardashian/West crew are all in her camp.

And yet, while hordes of Americans turn out in fever-pitch force at rallies for candidates like Trump and Sanders, Clinton doesn’t get the same reception.

It’s a malaise that can be partly racked up to an America firmly in the grips of an anti-establishment phase.

To everyday Americans, Clinton is the old guard

A year ago, the common wisdom was that the race for the White House would be a dynastic one between two old, wealthy American political families: Clinton v Bush.

The idea was all but repulsive to swathes of middle class American who were wiped out and are yet to recover from the horror of the Global Financial Crisis.

These Americans see the dynastic families as having success handed to them.

And so, in this way, candidates like Trump and Sanders represent the American dream — they’ve forged their own path and represent a fundamental hope.

In 2014, Obama said in an interview with George Sephanopoulos that he believed American people wanted something fresh in the presidency.

“I think the American people, you know, they’re gonna want that new car smell,” he said.

“You know, their own — they wanna drive somethin’ off of the lot that doesn’t have as much mileage as me,” he said.

Obama was referring to the fact that after two terms as president, his time was done, paving the way for a new leader.

However, the remarks — months before Clinton even declared her intention to run — captured the very problem that would haunt her campaign.

Americans want something new, fresh, exciting. And that’s something Hillary Clinton just isn’t.

The most qualified candidate

Hillary Clinton’s whole life has been working towards this moment.

A young lawyer who sought to make lives better, she went on to become a politically fierce First Lady.

She was the first First Lady to have her own office in the West Wing, pushing health care onto the agenda.

Post White House, she became the first female senator for the state of New York before seeking a failed 2008 bid for the presidential nomination.

That failure wasn’t the end of career, with Clinton instead just ramping up, taking on the key Secretary of State role in the Obama administration.

It is this hard-nosed political history and front line experience that makes Clinton objectively the most qualified candidate for the top job.

Her husband said it best: “I do not believe in my lifetime anybody has run for this job in a moment of great importance who is better qualified by knowledge, experience and temperament to do what needs to be done,” Bill Clinton declared in January.

As well as the on paper success, Clinton has an instantly recognisable world wide brand.

She’s known simply as “Hillary” — an honour bestowed on only the world’s most famous women. Think Oprah, Beyonce, Madonna. And then, Hillary.

Not even Clinton’s husband managed such a feat of brand recognition.

The scandals

Despite her political experience, it is true that Clinton’s most publicised scandals are directly bound up with her time as Secretary of State.

Firstly, there’s her email scandal, with reports this week that the FBI was seeking an indictment.

It’s been a slow burn issue that doesn’t go away and haunts her campaign almost weekly.

It was in March last year that it was first revealed that Clinton used a private server for official email exchanges while she was Secretary of State.

As recently as this week, she was accused of using the sever for super high level intelligence information known as “special access programs”.

These types of messages are even more sensitive than top secret.

The email saga is bound up with the problem of her other key scandal — Benghazi.

On September 11, 2012, the US embassy came under attack in Benghazi, Libya, killing the US ambassador and three americans.

It was in investigations about what went wrong in Benghazi that Clinton’s use of the private server was revealed.

As Secretary of State, Clinton was accused on not properly assessing the security concerts at the embassy. She has largely been cleared of any official wrongdoing, but the stain on her reputation remains.

In politics, appearance means a lot. And so it was particularly painful for the Clinton campaign that the Michael Bay blockbuster 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi — depicting the horror of the Benghazi attacks from the perspective of those caught up in them — was released this January.

Sensing opportunity, Trump packed theatres in Iowa with voters, offering them free tickets to the dramatisation of one of Clinton’s soft spots.

Bill Clinton baggage

Another soft spot Trump has targeted is the sexual history of Clinton’s husband.
Clinton finds herself inextricably linked, through no wrongdoing of her own, to one of America’s most dramatic political dramas in recent decades.

While America appeared to forgive its 42nd president, his history has clung to his wife like bad baggage.

Despite this, Clinton has repeatedly mobilised her husband in her election efforts — the former president is considered one of the world’s all time great political campaigners.

On the trail, Mr Clinton exalts his wife’s virtues, talking through her policy ideas, talking up her experiences and recounting memories of how they met and fell in love.

But every appearance he makes is seized on by Trump and others and portrayed as evidence of why Hillary is bad for women.

“She’s got one of the great women abusers of all time sitting in her house, waiting for her to come home for dinner,” Trump said.

And: “She wants to accuse me of things and the husband is one of the great abusers of the world,” Trump said. “Give me a break.”

And again: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”

Bill Clinton’s history is an albatross around his wife’s neck, which sees her opponents attempt to blunt any attack he is able to make on the campaign trail.

Worse for Clinton, this criticism is bound up with and plays into her very real statistical problem with women.

In theory, as a smart, successful and viable female candidate, she should have the support of the female liberal electorate.

But it just isn’t as clear cut as that, particularly with younger female voters.

A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll conducted this month has Sanders leading Clinton with young voters aged 18 to 34, with 46 per cent of the vote to her 35.

Narrow the poll to only women, and his lead was even more staggering — 50 per cent to Clinton’s 31.

There’s also the broader question of whether America is progressive enough to elect its first female president.

In Iowa, where Clinton is struggling to keep a lead on Sanders, the state only elected it’s first female member of congress in 2014.

Excitement factor fail

As Donald Trump capitalises on Clinton’s demons, Bernie Sanders has tried to harness her lack of the excitement factor.

Sanders declared this week “What this campaign is about, and I’m seeing it every day, is and excitement and energy that does not exist and will not exist in the Clinton campaign.”

So far, Sanders is right.

But does that mean one can’t become president?

The Clinton campaign for their bit are so angered by the enthusiasm critique that they have plastered their campaign offices with Sanders’s quote.

It’s meant to be motivational, and is accompanied with a day by day count down to the first votes in Iowa.

The campaign is also using Clinton’s husband to sell the message that she is a fresh, exciting candidate.

Mr Clinton repeatedly references his wife’s ability to make “change” — a clear attempt to separate Clinton from the establishment vibe that drags her down in the estimations of middle America.

“She’s a born changemaker and everything she ever touched she made better,” Mr Clinton told one rally.

And again: “It took my breath away when I realised 45 years ago that’s really what motivates her. She is walking, breathing change agent.”

Clinton will to continue to use her husband in her campaign strategy, and commentators say they are yet to see the former president bring the A-grade material he is so well known for.

This week Mr Clinton went for the attack on the republicans. Of their campaign, he said: “It may be entertaining, but it doesn’t have a lick of impact on how you live.”

Commentators lamented the lack of that special something that served Mr Clinton so well in campaigning almost two decades ago.

“The Clinton of lore, the one-in-a generation political natural … has yet to appear,” the New York Times wrote this week.

“Oh my god we’re gonna be president!”

Popular US comedy show Saturday Night Live featured a Clinton sketch late last year that was so loved it went viral on an international scale.

The sketch featured a Clinton impersonator laughing hysterically at the idea that her greatest competitors were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

“Oh my god we’re gonna be president!” comedian Amy Poehler, playing Clinton, cackled.

The sketch poked fun at the absurdity of these two men being Clinton’s nearest rivals.

It went viral because voters related to the humour. And yet, Clinton now has the senator from Vermont breathing down her neck while Trump goes from strength to strength.

This was always Clinton’s election to lose.

Despite her narrowing gap, a recent poll showed most Americans still believe she will win.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll found 54 per cent of people believed she would win the top job if she went head to head against Trump. They give her a wider lead against rivals like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

In theory, everything has been stacked in Clinton’s favour. Her experience, her politics and her celebrity support.

But theory doesn’t take in the complexity of the American relationship with the Clintons and establishment history.

This week, in response to young Iowan voter Taylor Gipple, Clinton reached for her experience to rebuff him.

“I have been around a long time and people have thrown all kinds of things at me and I can’t keep up with it,” she retorted.

“If you are new to politics and it’s the first time you’ve really paid attention, you go, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all of this’

“I have been on the frontline of change and politics since I was your age.”
And that might just be her problem.