Seven Takeaways From the Hillary Announcement Video

Seven Takeaways From the Hillary Announcement Video

By John Podhoretz
04.13.2015
Commentary


1) The video Hillary Clinton released announcing her candidacy is a liberal version of a “baseball, hot dogs, apple pies and Chevrolets” commercial—classic visual cliches evoking the America not of old but of older television commercials, only with single mothers and gay couples added to the mix.

2) The ad the video evokes, oddly enough, is the Ronald Reagan “it’s morning in America” spot from 1984. I say “oddly enough” because the implicit theme of “morning in America” was the comeback of the United States both financially and in its own self-understanding. That wasn’t spin. The ad was released during an economic growth spurt almost unimaginable today (the economy grew by 3.8 percent in 1982, 6.4 percent in 1983 and 6.3 percent in 1984—by 8.2 percent in the first quarter of 2004 alone).

3) Reagan could take credit for the changes because he was president. Hillary seems to be attempting to invoke a sense of optimism about the current American condition (at least among Democrats) for which she can realistically take no credit—which is also helpful, because to the extent that people do not feel optimistic, she doesn’t bear any responsibility for the bad feeling either.

4) Optimism is nice. The ad is nice. Hillary probably needs to look nice. She’s trying to look nice. You don’t immediately associate her with the word “upbeat.” Maybe if she spends $500 million to show she’s upbeat, people will come to agree. On the other hand, New Coke.

5) In the end, as E.J. Dionne points out, she has determined to run the way George H.W. Bush ran in 1988—and that Bush ran as “Reagan plus,” with promises to improve education and the environment. But Bush’s “thousands points of light” argle-bargle really had little to do with his landslide victory, as I recounted in my 1993 book, Hell of a Ride (now available on Amazon for the amazing price of one penny). He was Reagan’s third term, pure and simple; in the fall of 1988, Reagan hit an approval rating of 54 percent, and Bush received…53.4 percent. (And this was, of course, a decline of more than five points from Reagan’s 1984 margin of 58.9 percent. In 1986, before he fell into the trough of Iran-Contra, Reagan routinely scored approval ratings in the low 60s—a number Barack Obama has never even approached.)

6) In 1988, all the data suggested the public believed it was “time for a change.” I worked in the Reagan White House at the time, writing speeches for the president, and this was a problem we addressed head on—and helped Bush win as a result. In rally speech after rally speech, Ronald Reagan said, “People say it’s time for a change. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are the change.” The point was that the changes of the 1980s had not fully solidified and Bush was needed in large measure to assure that change was not reversed.

7) The bottom line: If Hillary is to be the second coming of George H.W. Bush, albeit a Democrat, Obama better up his game and fast. In the last quarter of 1988, when people were choosing between Bush or Michael Dukakis, the economy was growing by 5.4 percent. Reagan’s signature policies, from the tax cuts to tax reform to the defense buildup that put the Soviet Union on the track to dissolution, were all judged successes by the electorate. Obama’s signature policy, Obamacare, still polls badly—and his foreign policy isn’t looking any too good either, too put it mildly. To win, Hillary needs to be able to take advantage of the “we are the change” idea. Right now, it would work against her. Pretty badly.

Link to Commentary Magazine:

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/04/13/six-takeaways-from-the-hillary-announcement-video/

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