Five 2016 strategies that have already failed

By Glenn Thrush

David Axelrod, President Obama’s no-longer-mustachioed message man, once described political campaigns as an “MRI for the soul.”
Donald Trump’s campaign has also been an MRI for the besieged establishments of both parties – exposing the flaws, illusions and the failure of conventional play-it-safe presidential strategies.

At the moment, success in the 2016 race has less to do with strategy than identity – and chutzpah. With the exception of a flailing Hillary Clinton, not a single upper-tier candidate is a conventional Washington politician who has stuck to the script. Besides Trump, the only other Republican in double-digits nationally is the fast-rising Ben Carson, an African-American surgeon and social conservative who has never even flirted with public office. And Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist from Woody Allen land, is beating Clinton decisively in New Hampshire and is statistically tied with her, according to one poll, in Iowa.
It’s not clear if voters will revert to a more conventional mindset as summer gives way to fall – but here are five stodgy 2016 strategies that have already proven to be losers in 2015.
1. Smile and do nothing when The Donald hits you. For all his bravado, Trump grew up a cloistered, rich kid in a Forest Hills mansion. But he learned early and well the rule of the Queens schoolyard: If you smack the other kid – and he doesn’t punch back – his lunch money is yours.
Since July, Trump has rocketed up in the polls – a new CNN/ORD survey released Thursday has him at 32 percent nationally -- on the strength of his strength: He’d say something tough-sounding (Megyn Kelly stinks, Mexican immigrants are rapists, Carly Fiorina’s face is weird, etc.) the other GOP aspirants huddled together like scared seventh graders, hoping he’d pick on somebody else. In the first debate, Jeb Bush went so far as to deny a POLITICO story that described him calling out Trump in expletive-laced anger in private. Even the self-professed truth-telling Ohio Gov. John Kasich did his best don’t-taunt-the-tiger routine in Trump’s presence.
But politicians are, if nothing, professional self-preservationists. In the last few weeks, the herd has come to the collective realization that duck-and-cover isn’t going to make Trump go away. Prior to the first debate, Bush’s team was pushing the line that Trump’s ascent was actually good for their guy – it would shift the spotlight to someone else while Bush sharpened his political chops. That strategy ended fast, but maybe not fast enough: Bush has increasingly accused the frontrunner of being a political “insult” comic – and slammed the developer of being a Democrat in GOP drag. "This man is not a conservative,” Bush said last month in a Spanish-language interview. "He supports people like Nancy Pelosi. He has given money to Hillary Clinton. He's been a Democrat longer than he's been a Republican. He has said he's felt more comfortable being a Democrat.”
(Trump may ultimately pay a political price with Hispanic voters but he even managed to upstage Bush in that news cycle, telling Breitbart News that Bush was “a nice man. But he should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.")
The toughest Trump-bashing is taking place among those candidates most in danger of slipping imminently into the void. “Like all narcissists, Donald Trump is insecure and weak, and afraid of being exposed,” long-shot Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s governor, said on Thursday. “And that’s why he is constantly telling us how big and how rich and how great he is, and how insignificant everyone else is…”
2. Rand Paul: Redefine what it means to be a “Republican.” Paul, the maverick-y libertarian Republican from Kentucky, is suffering from a 2016 version of the Sports Illustrated cover curse. Ten short months ago Time magazine’s editors dubbed him “The Most Interesting Man in Politics,” owing to his unique (not to mention deeply laudable) attempt to expand the GOP’s outreach to minority groups typically associated with Democrats and scale back the country’s big-stick foreign policy – while pushing low-tax free-market principles. Since then, he’s gone from a the upper second-tier to the margin-of-error dregs


There are lots and lots of reasons for Paul’s fall from the cool-kid perch – his campaign has been poorly managed and riven with internal conflict, his performance in the first debate was a “little screechy” (in the words of one Rand backer to me at the time) and he’s had to backtrack on some of his more anti-interventionist positions, especially with regard to Russia’s actions in the Ukraine.
But his deepest problems are existential ones. He’s a political innovator at a time of anger and retrenchment – and his issue mix (this is a guy who opposes virtually any taxation but ventured to Detroit to tackle issues of urban poverty and criminal justice reform) has failed to strike a chord. Trump’s appeal is more hard-hat than egghead, and he’s risen in the polls by appealing to the party’s core of disaffected white voters with a slogan – “Making America Great Again,” which (oh-so vaguely) implies a more aggressive, Reagan-sequel global approach, more visceral than intellectual.
3. Jeb Bush: Shock and Awe. Remember the distant past (the early summer) when Jeb! had it all figured out? There was the $100-plus million in the bank, a revolutionary campaign structure that would give his super PAC primacy over his traditional campaign apparatus, a kinder-gentler primary pitch that would preserve his popularity in a general election.
Last December, Bush laid out the next year’s plans with remarkable candor and foresight: "I don't know if I'd be a good candidate or a bad one," Bush told a conference organized by the Wall Street Journal. "I kinda know how a Republican can win, whether it's me or somebody else -- and it has to be much more uplifting, much more positive, much more willing to be, 'lose the primary to win the general' without violating your principles. It's not an easy task, to be honest with you."
True that. The race is nowhere near over – and Bush’s cash, team talent and brains could yet pay off. But so far he’s a single-digit performer and lags far behind Trump and Carson in the first four primary states. His name has a lot to do with his problems; so does the perception, hammered home with great effect by Trump who has branded him “low energy,” a variant of the “Wimp Factor” attack that helped doom his father’s reelection bid. And $100 million is pin money for Trump whose much-disputed net wealth is estimated at least $4 billion.
4. Hillary Clinton: Get off my lawn. Clinton’s 2016 campaign was built, top to bottom, to exorcise the ghosts of 2008: She hired a savvy, reporter-friendly press staff; took pains to emphasize that she was the most down-to-earth rich person on the planet (Remember the “Scooby Van” and her staff’s schlepping on the Bolt Bus?); She was going to emphasize her “heart” – and talk more about her mother, daughter and granddaughter. As she did in 2008, Clinton hit the road in New Hampshire and Iowa with a hugging-and-handshaking vengeance.
But in one fundamental respect, nothing had really changed: In 1992 she demanded the media and public give her a “zone of privacy” by not delving into her personal life. Her original 2016 sin took place sometime in 2009 when she decided to homebrew her email server, flouting federal rules – for the purpose of shielding her family, friends and staff from prying eyes.
It didn’t work then and it hasn’t worked now – in part because the border between the private and public matters have always been fuzzy in Clintonland. And she remains, top Democratic operatives and donors close to the campaign have told me, deeply reluctant to engage the press – until this week’s NBC, ABC and Ellen Degeneres blitz.
“There is no doubt that she needs to find a consistent, authentic voice, which means shedding caution and chucking scripts,” Axelrod says. “Authenticity is a leading indicator in presidential elections, and this is her test. But if candidates were equities I would but a lot of HRC shares right now. I think they are trading low.”
5. Scott Walker: Fly under the radar. No candidate has fallen farther faster than the Wisconsin governor – who initially cast himself as a credible outsider who battled the unions and Washington politicians. His powerful (if grisly) February speech in Iowa – where he described labor supporters threatening to “gut my wife like a deer” – earned him instant credibility with the base, and an early lead in the caucus state. But he’s kept a low profile since, sparred with the national press, and let Trump hog the spotlight.
After a lackluster first debate performance, he now sits at about 6 percent nationally, and 5 percent in must-win Iowa.