USA | Känslan att Hillary Clinton inte entusiasmerar väljarna har tilltagit sedan utmanaren Bernie Sanders har börjat locka stora skaror.
Lösningen, enligt hennes campaign manager Robby Mook, är att låta Clinton få den tid hon behöver ute på fältet för att väljarna skall se henne som en historisk chans att kunna välja USA:s första kvinnliga president.
Detta skall kombineras med att väljarna får se en Hillary som gärna framhäver sig själv som en riktig medelsvensson som delar den vanlige amerikanens erfarenheter och vardag.
Detta är just så motsägelsefullt som det låter. Men konstigare kampanjupplägg har varit framgångsrika i amerikanska presidentvalskampanjer.
Tillsammans med en välfylld kampanjkassan, kalla nerver och ett målinriktad kampanjupplägg skall fixa valsegern.
Mark Leibovich rapporterade från hennes kampanj för The New York Times Magazine:
Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experiences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small.
[…]
These are things Hillary Clinton has been talking about as she has undertaken the messy practice of what political types refer to as ‘‘reintroducing’’ — or, in Clinton’s case, re-re-re-reintroducing.
Still, all those introductions and forays into hostile territories have left her with battle scars. She is wary to a point where the control-freak tendencies of her campaign, especially with regard to how she is portrayed in the press, have reinforced an established story line: that she is sealed off and inaccessible and not like the rest of us. ‘‘DO YOU HAVE A PERCEPTION PROBLEM?’’ a reporter shouted out at her during Clinton’s last visit to New Hampshire, not quite the icebreaker you’d wish for when making reintroductions. As a rule, the media is not Clinton’s preferred confidant.
[…]
From the outset of the campaign, any hope that Clinton might unveil a more freewheeling style in keeping with the more unplugged sensibilities of today’s political and media culture lasted for all of, well, never. Signs of apparent spontaneity and whimsy have been nonexistent — she has been largely steadfast in avoiding interviews, with a campaign team that can convey a heavy-handed preoccupation with control.
[…]
Clinton’s enterprise has a grind-it-out quality reminiscent of Obama’s re-election strategy of 2012: cover your base, attack often. Her team will emphasize data, targeting and field operations — all specialties Mook sharpened as a wunderkind state director for Clinton in 2008 and in subsequent statewide and congressional races. Ground troops will identify supporters and make sure they vote, without giving much thought to persuading swing voters. In nearly every campaign event, the candidate catalogs all the fights she has waged on their ‘‘everyday American’’ behalf. That’s as close as there comes to a big idea in this expedition. To fight is a skill, and it creates a spectacle, but it hardly constitutes a vision. Nor is it a particularly fresh theme for Democratic presidential candidates, who have been trumpeting their ‘‘I’ll fight for you’’ credentials for decades (the future lobbyist Richard Gephardt used to punctuate his labor-heavy rallies with an impassioned ‘‘It’s your fight too!’’).
Clinton often says at her events that her campaign is ‘‘not about me.’’ All politicians say that (even though, of course, it is about them). But she is right in that she stands for bigger things, not least among them the goal of electing a woman as president. Her sex gives the campaign a built-in point of connection, and compared with what she did in 2008, Clinton has not hesitated to emphasize the factor known euphemistically as ‘‘the historic nature of her candidacy.’’
[…]
Mook projects a confidence belying his age and the stresses of his job. As the campaign manager, he sits in the bull’s-eye within the many circles of insanity that ring Planet Clintonia. (Actually, Mook does not sit, as his office is equipped with a standing desk.) What impressed me was how he dispatched my question about reconciling the divide between the candidate’s cautious persona and the private ‘‘Hillary I know’’ that her disciples swear by. ‘‘What I worry about is us getting up in our heads too much and trying to manufacture one thing or another,’’ he told me. ‘‘My priority is letting her take her time to get out there, let the voters see who she is, rather than some Wizard of Oz.’’
Tidskriftsomslag: The New York Times Magazine, 19 juli 2015.
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