The Inevitability Trap

e Sunday before Election Day, Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd of voters at an afternoon rally in Nashua, New Hampshire. The state has long served as a source of political renewal for the Clintons. Early in 1992, during Bill Clinton’s first Presidential run, he was hobbled by allegations of womanizing, but he finished a strong second in the New Hampshire primary, and his campaign rebounded. In 2008, Hillary lost to Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses but defied the polls in New Hampshire, which showed Obama far ahead, and won the state, setting up a marathon nomination fight that lasted into June. On Sunday, she was ostensibly in the state to boost the campaigns of Governor Maggie Hassan and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, both threatened by the surging Republican tide. It was also an ideal opportunity for Clinton to advertise her unofficial status as the Democrat to beat in the 2016 primaries.“It’s really hard for me to express how grateful I am, on behalf of my husband and myself, to the people of New Hampshire,” Clinton said. “Starting way back in 1991, you opened your homes and your hearts to us. And in 2008, during the darkest days of my campaign, you lifted me up, you gave me my voice back, you taught me so much about grit and determination, and I will never forget that.”

Many of the candidates for whom Clinton campaigned throughout the summer and fall lost on Tuesday. Shaheen, though, was one of the clear Democratic winners. She asked at the rally what many were thinking: “Are we ready for Hillary?” The crowd chanted Clinton’s name, and she mouthed a thank-you. In national surveys this year, Clinton’s support among Democrats has been as high as seventy-three per cent. That makes her the most dominant front-runner at this stage of a Presidential contest in the Party’s modern history. Media pundits and political strategists agree overwhelmingly that Hillary’s lead within the Party is unassailable. Tuesday’s results, which gave Republicans control of both the House and the Senate, may solidify her standing, as Democrats close ranks around her in an effort to hang on to the White House, their last foothold on power in Washington. But the election results could also lead to an entirely different outcome: a Republican Party that overinterprets its mandate in Congress and pushes its Presidential candidates far to the right, freeing Democrats to gamble on someone younger or more progressive than Clinton.

In every fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the past five decades, there has come a moment when the front-runner faltered. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, told me. Voters in the early states, perhaps spurred by a sense of civic responsibility, begin to take an interest in candidates they had previously never heard of. Those candidates seize on issues, usually ones that excite the left, that the front-runner, focussed on the general election, has been too timid to champion. The press, invested in political drama, declares that the front-runner is vulnerable.

Since the nineteen-eighties, four Democratic-primary contests have featured an establishment-backed front-runner who, early in the race, encountered little competition, but who eventually faced a vigorous challenge from a relative unknown. In 1984, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, loomed over the Democratic field much as Clinton does now. In Iowa, Mondale defeated Senator Gary Hart, a younger candidate whose aim was to modernize the Democratic Party, by a wide margin, 49 to 16.5 per cent, but Hart emerged as a serious threat nonetheless. “The only thing anybody gave a damn about that night was who came in second—Who was the other guy?” Joe Trippi, who ran Mondale’s campaign in Iowa, told me. But nobody in the Hart campaign had thought to slate delegates in the later primary states, and Mondale’s superior organization prevailed.

In 2000, Vice-President Al Gore’s ability to raise money and secure Democratic endorsements scared off most competitors, but then Senator Bill Bradley jumped into the race and briefly threatened Gore. Dunn, who worked for Bradley, said that the campaign used Gore’s experience against him “by finding the things that progressives were upset with in the Clinton Administration.” In 2004, the dark horse was Howard Dean, an unknown ex-governor of Vermont, who faced four experienced members of Congress: Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Dick Gephardt. Kerry emerged as the leading candidate, but Dean briefly surged ahead in the polls when he attacked Kerry and other Democrats for being too supportive of the Bush Administration. Although Dean built a large following, he couldn’t organize it.

“In some ways I got captivated by my own campaign,” Dean told me. He found it impossible to make the ideological and stylistic shifts that might have transformed him from insurgent into front-runner. “The problem with running against somebody like Hillary—or my problem running against Kerry—is that, when you make the turn, then you disappoint all your followers.”

In the fall of 2007, Obama had a respectable national following as a senator, but Hillary Clinton led by more than thirty points in some national polls. Like Hart, Obama ran on a simple message of new versus old—“Change”—but he was prepared for a long fight over delegates when the press anointed him Clinton’s main challenger. As Bradley had done with Gore, Obama attacked Clinton on matters that liberals cared about, but his main issue—the war in Iraq—was more powerful than anything available to Bradley, who had focussed on gun control and universal health care. And, like Dean, Obama energized new voters, including many African-Americans, a key voting group in Democratic primaries. But Obama had a sophisticated plan to get them to the polls. These three ingredients—message, demographics, and organization—were just enough to defeat Clinton in the primaries. For the first time in modern history, a Democratic insurgency defeated the establishment.

Could it happen again? “There is going to be a challenge,” Trippi said. “And I would never underestimate the challenge if I were the Clinton campaign.” Dean has said that he will support Clinton if she runs. “I think the chances are fifty-fifty the Republicans are going to nominate a nutcase, and Hillary’s the perfect foil for a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz,” he told me. But he also endorsed the idea of a strong debate: “I actually don’t think a primary is a bad thing. I think coronations are bad things.” Another Democratic strategist described the effect that even a losing challenger could have on the race. “If you get a deft insurgent, they may not win. But an insurgent could torture this poor woman.”

O’Malley, who is fifty-one, is one of several candidates who are considering running for the Democratic nomination. A two-term governor of Maryland, he is youthful-looking despite a receding hairline. In January of 2013, he briefly became an Internet sensation when photos emerged of him participating in a polar-bear plunge, wearing a bathing suit and revealing six-pack abs. One Sunday morning in mid-October, he was scanning the crowded tables at the Drake Diner in Des Moines. He was hungry—“Smelling all these eggs, it’s killing me!”—but he had work to do before he could eat. He pirouetted around a waitress delivering omelettes and descended on a family of four to introduce himself. Like most of the restaurant’s patrons, they had no idea who he was.

Historically, the longer a party remains in power, the more emboldened its activist base becomes. Many liberals are frustrated with Obama’s inability to enact more progressive change, such as assertive policies against global warming and income inequality, comprehensive immigration reform, or a less hawkish foreign policy. Democratic-primary voters are always eager to see a fresh potential candidate. “Seventy or eighty per cent of people want to hear from a new perspective before they make a decision about whether to go with what they know,” O’Malley told me. “A person becomes very famous in this country very quickly.”

O’Malley isn’t new to politics. His parents met in 1954, in Washington, where they worked together on a Young Democrats newsletter. In 1965, when he turned two, they frosted his birthday cake with the words “Martin for President 2004.” He’s been running for one office or another since he was in grade school, at Our Lady of Lourdes, in Bethesda, Maryland. In the past twenty-four years, he has served at just about every level of government in his state: Baltimore city councilman for eight years, mayor of Baltimore for eight years, and governor of Maryland for eight years. In January, facing term limits, he’ll be out of a job. There’s only one other elective office he wants to pursue.

In Des Moines, at the diner, O’Malley eagerly introduced himself to patrons and asked them to vote for Iowa’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Jack Hatch, who was not known for his flash or political skills. A longtime Democratic state legislator, Hatch was running fifteen points behind, in an ultimately doomed campaign against Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican chief executive. O’Malley was one of the few Democrats who had bothered to campaign for him. It was an odd scene: a little-known governor from a state a thousand miles away, introducing the candidate to his own voters. “He’s running for governor, and he needs your help,” O’Malley said, then dashed to another table to greet more Iowans.

Clinton can’t present herself as a novelty. She’ll be sixty-nine on Election Day in 2016 and has been a national figure for a quarter century. The last politician to become President after a similarly long and distinguished career was George H. W. Bush. Since then, the office has been won by relative newcomers: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. “The one time in my political life that we’ve gone back a generation was Carter to Reagan,” Dean said. “Once you change the page on generations, you don’t go back.” He added that Clinton could be the exception.

O’Malley has been thinking about the political dynamics of new versus old for a long time. In 1984, he took a semester off from Catholic University to volunteer for Hart, who represented a new generation of Democratic thinking, even though he was only eight years younger than Mondale. O’Malley and a friend signed on with the campaign. “We made the decision at the age of twenty that we weren’t going to defeat Reagan after one term by offering up the same old leadership from yesterday,” O’Malley told me.

The conventional wisdom heading into the Iowa caucuses, he reminded me, was that “Mondale was totally inevitable, and the only person with a chance of beating him was astronaut John Glenn.” The story that unfolded instead “was that Glenn totally imploded, pancaked, and Gary Hart got sixteen per cent, and it was that distant second place that was heard around the world.”

The Hart campaign’s organizational failure was an education for O’Malley. “It was like a ‘Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ experience for me,” O’Malley said. “I walked into the wardrobe, I got about twenty years of adult experience in management and being under deadlines and high pressure, and then I came back and I was still twenty-one.”

e history of Democratic primaries suggests that an insurgent can’t expect to gain recognition with only a fresh face and a superior organization. Inevitably, the candidate must attack the front-runner from the left. O’Malley is not necessarily a natural candidate to pursue this strategy, but he is trying.

As a mayor and as a governor, he has been known for bringing a McKinsey-esque reform to Baltimore and to Annapolis, instituting programs that use computer-aided metrics to judge government performance. In 2002, when he was mayor, Esquire called him one of the “best and brightest”; in 2009, as governor, he was honored by the magazine Governing as one of the “public officials of the year.” He applied his data-driven techniques to crime, and Baltimore’s murder rate plummeted to below three hundred per year for the first time in a decade. Until recently, he hasn’t offered much to Democrats who are worried that Hillary is too centrist on economics and foreign policy. But in the past two years he has won approval of gun-control legislation, a new state immigration law, the repeal of the death penalty, and an increase in the minimum wage. There was only one warning sign for O’Malley as he canvassed Iowa. His lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown, who was running to succeed him as governor, was in a close race against a local businessman and political upstart, Larry Hogan, who attacked the O’Malley administration for raising taxes.

O’Malley’s strategy so far suggests that the 2016 primaries may turn into a debate not so much about Clinton’s record as about Obama’s effectiveness as a leader—an issue that Republicans used to win races last week, and which they would almost certainly raise in a general election against Clinton. O’Malley told me that Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis was too timid: “When the Recovery and Reinvestment Act was introduced, it was probably half of what it needed to be, and the congressional parts of our own party watered it down to a half of that, which meant it was about a quarter of what it needed to be.” And Obama was too soft on Wall Street, O’Malley said. “The moment was ripe for much more aggressive action. If an institution is too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to prosecute, then it’s probably too damn big.” O’Malley also talks about inequality, in terms that more populist Democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, who insists she isn’t running for President, have embraced, but which Obama and Clinton have generally avoided.

Clinton has said little about economic policy in recent years and could co-opt some of the same arguments without seeming overly disloyal to the President. Many liberals, though, will want concrete promises on policy rather than mere sound bites. Michael Podhorzer, the political director at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “What we learned from the Obama Administration is that if the Presidential candidate surrounds themself with the usual Wall Street suspects, then, whatever the populist rhetoric is, that’s not going to be good enough.”

At the Drake Diner, O’Malley sat down briefly with Hatch and Monica Vernon, Hatch’s running mate, to discuss the race against Branstad. O’Malley had a tightly scheduled day of events ahead and he ordered the No. 5: scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, pancakes, and coffee.

“How’s it going?” he asked the two candidates.

Hatch complained that everyone except a few labor PACs had given up on him. Voters weren’t giving him a close look, because Branstad seemed like the inevitable victor. O’Malley told Hatch not to give up.

“There’s a tremendous David-versus-Goliath Zeitgeist going on out there,” he said. In his own underdog races, the key was to figure out “the narrative” to use against the front-runner and to stick to it. “You guys have to be the new.”

On Tuesday, Hatch lost by more than twenty points. In Maryland, in one of the biggest upsets, Hogan defeated Brown by five points. The loss will make it difficult for O’Malley to argue that his economic agenda in Maryland is a winning formula for his party nationally. “I wasn’t on the ballot,” he told me after the election, insisting that the results won’t change his plans. “In the last race that I ran, in 2010—not a very easy year—the exact same tax attacks were levelled and the economy was even worse, and we won by fourteen points.”

At the diner, O’Malley’s aide told the Governor it was time to get to the next event. He looked at her and frowned. “But I ordered the No. 5.”

Democratic strategists like to divide the Party’s electorate into “wine track” and “beer track” voters. Insurgents typically have done well with the wine track—college-educated liberals—and although that portion of the electorate has grown, it’s still not enough to win. (Hart once told me that he did well in all the states that were benefitting from globalization; Mondale, who had union support, did well in all the states where workers were feeling economically squeezed.) It’s not clear what major demographic group O’Malley could steal from Clinton; for now, he seems like a classic wine-track insurgent. On Tuesday, the Republican victory in Maryland was fuelled by working-class and suburban voters, who revolted against higher taxes."" style="margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: bottom; display: inline-block; box-sizing: border-box;">

“Because of the way that the financial sector dominates both parties, the distinctions that can be made on truly troubling issues are very minor,” he said. He told a story of an effort he led in the Senate in 2010 to try to pass a windfall-profits tax that would have targeted executives at banks and firms which were rescued by the government after the 2008 financial crisis. He said that when he was debating whether to vote for the original bailout package, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he relied on the advice of an analyst on Wall Street, who told him, “No. 1, you have to do this, because otherwise the world economy will go into cataclysmic free fall. But, No. 2, you have to punish these guys. It is outrageous what they did.”

After the rescue, when Webb pushed for what he saw as a reasonable punishment, his own party blocked the legislation. “The Democrats wouldn’t let me vote on it,” he said. “Because either way you voted on that, you’re making somebody mad. And the financial sector was furious.” He added that one Northeastern senator—Webb wouldn’t say who—“was literally screaming at me on the Senate floor.”

When Clinton was a New York senator, from 2001 to 2009, she fiercely defended the financial industry, which was a crucial source of campaign contributions and of jobs in her state. “If you don’t have stock, and a lot of people in this country don’t have stock, you’re not doing very well,” Webb said. Webb is a populist, but a cautious one, especially on taxes, the issue that seems to have backfired against O’Malley’s administration. As a senator, Webb frustrated some Democrats because he refused to raise individual income-tax rates. But as President, he says, he would be aggressive about taxing income from investments: “Fairness says if you’re a hedge-fund manager or making deals where you’re making hundreds of millions of dollars and you’re paying capital-gains tax on that, rather than ordinary income tax, something’s wrong, and people know something’s wrong. ”

The Clintons and Obama have championed policies that help the poor by strengthening the safety net, but they have shown relatively little interest in structural changes that would reverse runaway income inequality. “There is a big tendency among a lot of Democratic leaders to feed some raw meat to the public on smaller issues that excite them, like the minimum wage, but don’t really address the larger problem,” Webb said. “A lot of the Democratic leaders who don’t want to scare away their financial supporters will say we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going do these little things, when in reality we need to say we’re going to fundamentally change the tax code so that you will believe our system is fair.”

Webb could challenge Clinton on other domestic issues as well. In 1984, he spent some time as a reporter studying the prison system in Japan, which has a relatively low recidivism rate. In the Senate, he pushed for creating a national commission that would study the American prison system, and he convened hearings on the economic consequences of mass incarceration. He says he even hired three staffers who had criminal records. “If you have been in prison, God help you if you want to really rebuild your life,” Webb told me. “We’ve got seven million people somehow involved in the system right now, and they need a structured way to reënter society and be productive again.” He didn’t mention it, but he is aware that the prison population in the U.S. exploded after the Clinton Administration signed tough new sentencing laws.

The issue that Webb cares about the most, and which could cause serious trouble for Hillary Clinton, is the one that Obama used to defeat her: Clinton’s record on war. In the Obama Administration, Clinton took the more hawkish position in three major debates that divided the President’s national-security team. In 2009, she was an early advocate of the troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, along with Samantha Power, who was then a member of the White House National Security Council staff and is now the U.N. Ambassador, she pushed Obama to attack Libyan forces that were threatening the city of Benghazi. That year, Clinton also advocated arming Syrian rebels and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, a policy that Obama rejected. Now, as ISIS consolidates its control over parts of the Middle East and Iran’s influence grows, Clinton is still grappling with the consequences of her original vote for the war in Iraq.

 

In every fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the past five decades, there has come a moment when the front-runner faltered. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does politics,” Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, told me. Voters in the early states, perhaps spurred by a sense of civic responsibility, begin to take an interest in candidates they had previously never heard of. Those candidates seize on issues, usually ones that excite the left, that the front-runner, focussed on the general election, has been too timid to champion. The press, invested in political drama, declares that the front-runner is vulnerable.

Since the nineteen-eighties, four Democratic-primary contests have featured an establishment-backed front-runner who, early in the race, encountered little competition, but who eventually faced a vigorous challenge from a relative unknown. In 1984, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, loomed over the Democratic field much as Clinton does now. In Iowa, Mondale defeated Senator Gary Hart, a younger candidate whose aim was to modernize the Democratic Party, by a wide margin, 49 to 16.5 per cent, but Hart emerged as a serious threat nonetheless. “The only thing anybody gave a damn about that night was who came in second—Who was the other guy?” Joe Trippi, who ran Mondale’s campaign in Iowa, told me. But nobody in the Hart campaign had thought to slate delegates in the later primary states, and Mondale’s superior organization prevailed.

In 2000, Vice-President Al Gore’s ability to raise money and secure Democratic endorsements scared off most competitors, but then Senator Bill Bradley jumped into the race and briefly threatened Gore. Dunn, who worked for Bradley, said that the campaign used Gore’s experience against him “by finding the things that progressives were upset with in the Clinton Administration.” In 2004, the dark horse was Howard Dean, an unknown ex-governor of Vermont, who faced four experienced members of Congress: Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Dick Gephardt. Kerry emerged as the leading candidate, but Dean briefly surged ahead in the polls when he attacked Kerry and other Democrats for being too supportive of the Bush Administration. Although Dean built a large following, he couldn’t organize it.

“In some ways I got captivated by my own campaign,” Dean told me. He found it impossible to make the ideological and stylistic shifts that might have transformed him from insurgent into front-runner. “The problem with running against somebody like Hillary—or my problem running against Kerry—is that, when you make the turn, then you disappoint all your followers.”

 

In the fall of 2007, Obama had a respectable national following as a senator, but Hillary Clinton led by more than thirty points in some national polls. Like Hart, Obama ran on a simple message of new versus old—“Change”—but he was prepared for a long fight over delegates when the press anointed him Clinton’s main challenger. As Bradley had done with Gore, Obama attacked Clinton on matters that liberals cared about, but his main issue—the war in Iraq—was more powerful than anything available to Bradley, who had focussed on gun control and universal health care. And, like Dean, Obama energized new voters, including many African-Americans, a key voting group in Democratic primaries. But Obama had a sophisticated plan to get them to the polls. These three ingredients—message, demographics, and organization—were just enough to defeat Clinton in the primaries. For the first time in modern history, a Democratic insurgency defeated the establishment.

Could it happen again? “There is going to be a challenge,” Trippi said. “And I would never underestimate the challenge if I were the Clinton campaign.” Dean has said that he will support Clinton if she runs. “I think the chances are fifty-fifty the Republicans are going to nominate a nutcase, and Hillary’s the perfect foil for a Rand Paul or a Ted Cruz,” he told me. But he also endorsed the idea of a strong debate: “I actually don’t think a primary is a bad thing. I think coronations are bad things.” Another Democratic strategist described the effect that even a losing challenger could have on the race. “If you get a deft insurgent, they may not win. But an insurgent could torture this poor woman.”

“Hi, I’m Martin O’Malley, the governor of Maryland. Are you guys Iowans?”

O’Malley, who is fifty-one, is one of several candidates who are considering running for the Democratic nomination. A two-term governor of Maryland, he is youthful-looking despite a receding hairline. In January of 2013, he briefly became an Internet sensation when photos emerged of him participating in a polar-bear plunge, wearing a bathing suit and revealing six-pack abs. One Sunday morning in mid-October, he was scanning the crowded tables at the Drake Diner in Des Moines. He was hungry—“Smelling all these eggs, it’s killing me!”—but he had work to do before he could eat. He pirouetted around a waitress delivering omelettes and descended on a family of four to introduce himself. Like most of the restaurant’s patrons, they had no idea who he was.

Historically, the longer a party remains in power, the more emboldened its activist base becomes. Many liberals are frustrated with Obama’s inability to enact more progressive change, such as assertive policies against global warming and income inequality, comprehensive immigration reform, or a less hawkish foreign policy. Democratic-primary voters are always eager to see a fresh potential candidate. “Seventy or eighty per cent of people want to hear from a new perspective before they make a decision about whether to go with what they know,” O’Malley told me. “A person becomes very famous in this country very quickly.”

O’Malley isn’t new to politics. His parents met in 1954, in Washington, where they worked together on a Young Democrats newsletter. In 1965, when he turned two, they frosted his birthday cake with the words “Martin for President 2004.” He’s been running for one office or another since he was in grade school, at Our Lady of Lourdes, in Bethesda, Maryland. In the past twenty-four years, he has served at just about every level of government in his state: Baltimore city councilman for eight years, mayor of Baltimore for eight years, and governor of Maryland for eight years. In January, facing term limits, he’ll be out of a job. There’s only one other elective office he wants to pursue.

In Des Moines, at the diner, O’Malley eagerly introduced himself to patrons and asked them to vote for Iowa’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Jack Hatch, who was not known for his flash or political skills. A longtime Democratic state legislator, Hatch was running fifteen points behind, in an ultimately doomed campaign against Terry Branstad, the state’s Republican chief executive. O’Malley was one of the few Democrats who had bothered to campaign for him. It was an odd scene: a little-known governor from a state a thousand miles away, introducing the candidate to his own voters. “He’s running for governor, and he needs your help,” O’Malley said, then dashed to another table to greet more Iowans.

Clinton can’t present herself as a novelty. She’ll be sixty-nine on Election Day in 2016 and has been a national figure for a quarter century. The last politician to become President after a similarly long and distinguished career was George H. W. Bush. Since then, the office has been won by relative newcomers: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. “The one time in my political life that we’ve gone back a generation was Carter to Reagan,” Dean said. “Once you change the page on generations, you don’t go back.” He added that Clinton could be the exception.

 

O’Malley has been thinking about the political dynamics of new versus old for a long time. In 1984, he took a semester off from Catholic University to volunteer for Hart, who represented a new generation of Democratic thinking, even though he was only eight years younger than Mondale. O’Malley and a friend signed on with the campaign. “We made the decision at the age of twenty that we weren’t going to defeat Reagan after one term by offering up the same old leadership from yesterday,” O’Malley told me.

The conventional wisdom heading into the Iowa caucuses, he reminded me, was that “Mondale was totally inevitable, and the only person with a chance of beating him was astronaut John Glenn.” The story that unfolded instead “was that Glenn totally imploded, pancaked, and Gary Hart got sixteen per cent, and it was that distant second place that was heard around the world.”

The Hart campaign’s organizational failure was an education for O’Malley. “It was like a ‘Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ experience for me,” O’Malley said. “I walked into the wardrobe, I got about twenty years of adult experience in management and being under deadlines and high pressure, and then I came back and I was still twenty-one.”

The history of Democratic primaries suggests that an insurgent can’t expect to gain recognition with only a fresh face and a superior organization. Inevitably, the candidate must attack the front-runner from the left. O’Malley is not necessarily a natural candidate to pursue this strategy, but he is trying.

As a mayor and as a governor, he has been known for bringing a McKinsey-esque reform to Baltimore and to Annapolis, instituting programs that use computer-aided metrics to judge government performance. In 2002, when he was mayor, Esquire called him one of the “best and brightest”; in 2009, as governor, he was honored by the magazine Governing as one of the “public officials of the year.” He applied his data-driven techniques to crime, and Baltimore’s murder rate plummeted to below three hundred per year for the first time in a decade. Until recently, he hasn’t offered much to Democrats who are worried that Hillary is too centrist on economics and foreign policy. But in the past two years he has won approval of gun-control legislation, a new state immigration law, the repeal of the death penalty, and an increase in the minimum wage. There was only one warning sign for O’Malley as he canvassed Iowa. His lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown, who was running to succeed him as governor, was in a close race against a local businessman and political upstart, Larry Hogan, who attacked the O’Malley administration for raising taxes.

O’Malley’s strategy so far suggests that the 2016 primaries may turn into a debate not so much about Clinton’s record as about Obama’s effectiveness as a leader—an issue that Republicans used to win races last week, and which they would almost certainly raise in a general election against Clinton. O’Malley told me that Obama’s response to the 2008 financial crisis was too timid: “When the Recovery and Reinvestment Act was introduced, it was probably half of what it needed to be, and the congressional parts of our own party watered it down to a half of that, which meant it was about a quarter of what it needed to be.” And Obama was too soft on Wall Street, O’Malley said. “The moment was ripe for much more aggressive action. If an institution is too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to prosecute, then it’s probably too damn big.” O’Malley also talks about inequality, in terms that more populist Democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, who insists she isn’t running for President, have embraced, but which Obama and Clinton have generally avoided.

Clinton has said little about economic policy in recent years and could co-opt some of the same arguments without seeming overly disloyal to the President. Many liberals, though, will want concrete promises on policy rather than mere sound bites. Michael Podhorzer, the political director at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “What we learned from the Obama Administration is that if the Presidential candidate surrounds themself with the usual Wall Street suspects, then, whatever the populist rhetoric is, that’s not going to be good enough.”

 

At the Drake Diner, O’Malley sat down briefly with Hatch and Monica Vernon, Hatch’s running mate, to discuss the race against Branstad. O’Malley had a tightly scheduled day of events ahead and he ordered the No. 5: scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, pancakes, and coffee.

“How’s it going?” he asked the two candidates.

Hatch complained that everyone except a few labor PACs had given up on him. Voters weren’t giving him a close look, because Branstad seemed like the inevitable victor. O’Malley told Hatch not to give up.

“There’s a tremendous David-versus-Goliath Zeitgeist going on out there,” he said. In his own underdog races, the key was to figure out “the narrative” to use against the front-runner and to stick to it. “You guys have to be the new.”

On Tuesday, Hatch lost by more than twenty points. In Maryland, in one of the biggest upsets, Hogan defeated Brown by five points. The loss will make it difficult for O’Malley to argue that his economic agenda in Maryland is a winning formula for his party nationally. “I wasn’t on the ballot,” he told me after the election, insisting that the results won’t change his plans. “In the last race that I ran, in 2010—not a very easy year—the exact same tax attacks were levelled and the economy was even worse, and we won by fourteen points.”

At the diner, O’Malley’s aide told the Governor it was time to get to the next event. He looked at her and frowned. “But I ordered the No. 5.”

Democratic strategists like to divide the Party’s electorate into “wine track” and “beer track” voters. Insurgents typically have done well with the wine track—college-educated liberals—and although that portion of the electorate has grown, it’s still not enough to win. (Hart once told me that he did well in all the states that were benefitting from globalization; Mondale, who had union support, did well in all the states where workers were feeling economically squeezed.) It’s not clear what major demographic group O’Malley could steal from Clinton; for now, he seems like a classic wine-track insurgent. On Tuesday, the Republican victory in Maryland was fuelled by working-class and suburban voters, who revolted against higher taxes.

“I’m sorry—you tapped into something no one cares about.”

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Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who served one term, from 2007 to 2013, and then retired, has the potential to win the beer-track vote. In early October, I drove from Washington to a residential building that sits high on a hill in Arlington. On the eighth floor, in a condominium with a sweeping view of Washington’s monuments, Webb has been plotting his own path to defeating Clinton. “I do believe that I have the leadership and the experience and the sense of history and the kinds of ideas where I could lead this country,” he told me. “We’re just going to go out and put things on the table in the next four or five months and see if people support us. And if it looks viable, then we’ll do it.”

Webb is a moderate on foreign policy, but he is a Vietnam veteran from a long line of military men. His condo, which he uses as a study, is filled with antique weaponry and historical artifacts from his ancestors. He showed me a bookcase filled with collectibles. “I’ve been to a lot of battlefields,” he said. He pointed to some sand from Iwo Jima; glass from Tinian, the island from which the Enola Gay was launched before it dropped an atomic bomb on Japan; and some shrapnel from Vietnam. “I have that in my leg,” he said.

After the war, Webb became a writer. His most famous book, “Fields of Fire,” published in 1978, is a novel based on his own experiences and has been credibly compared to Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” for its realistic portrayal of war. Webb has always moved restlessly between the military and politics and the life of a writer. In the late seventies and early eighties, he worked as a counsel on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and later as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. He has also travelled around the world as a journalist for Parade. In 2007, I interviewed him in his Senate office weeks after he was sworn in. He noted that he was having a hard time adjusting to life as a senator and missed his writing life. Now, in Arlington, he talked about the unfinished business of his Senate career.

In his senatorial race, Webb did well not only in northern Virginia, which is filled with Washington commuters and college-educated liberals, but also with rural, working-class white voters in Appalachia. In 2008, those voters were generally more loyal to Clinton than to Obama, but Webb believes that he could attract a national coalition of both groups of voters in the Presidential primaries. He laid out a view of Wall Street that differs sharply from Clinton’s.

 

“Because of the way that the financial sector dominates both parties, the distinctions that can be made on truly troubling issues are very minor,” he said. He told a story of an effort he led in the Senate in 2010 to try to pass a windfall-profits tax that would have targeted executives at banks and firms which were rescued by the government after the 2008 financial crisis. He said that when he was debating whether to vote for the original bailout package, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, he relied on the advice of an analyst on Wall Street, who told him, “No. 1, you have to do this, because otherwise the world economy will go into cataclysmic free fall. But, No. 2, you have to punish these guys. It is outrageous what they did.”

After the rescue, when Webb pushed for what he saw as a reasonable punishment, his own party blocked the legislation. “The Democrats wouldn’t let me vote on it,” he said. “Because either way you voted on that, you’re making somebody mad. And the financial sector was furious.” He added that one Northeastern senator—Webb wouldn’t say who—“was literally screaming at me on the Senate floor.”

When Clinton was a New York senator, from 2001 to 2009, she fiercely defended the financial industry, which was a crucial source of campaign contributions and of jobs in her state. “If you don’t have stock, and a lot of people in this country don’t have stock, you’re not doing very well,” Webb said. Webb is a populist, but a cautious one, especially on taxes, the issue that seems to have backfired against O’Malley’s administration. As a senator, Webb frustrated some Democrats because he refused to raise individual income-tax rates. But as President, he says, he would be aggressive about taxing income from investments: “Fairness says if you’re a hedge-fund manager or making deals where you’re making hundreds of millions of dollars and you’re paying capital-gains tax on that, rather than ordinary income tax, something’s wrong, and people know something’s wrong. ”

The Clintons and Obama have championed policies that help the poor by strengthening the safety net, but they have shown relatively little interest in structural changes that would reverse runaway income inequality. “There is a big tendency among a lot of Democratic leaders to feed some raw meat to the public on smaller issues that excite them, like the minimum wage, but don’t really address the larger problem,” Webb said. “A lot of the Democratic leaders who don’t want to scare away their financial supporters will say we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going do these little things, when in reality we need to say we’re going to fundamentally change the tax code so that you will believe our system is fair.”

Webb could challenge Clinton on other domestic issues as well. In 1984, he spent some time as a reporter studying the prison system in Japan, which has a relatively low recidivism rate. In the Senate, he pushed for creating a national commission that would study the American prison system, and he convened hearings on the economic consequences of mass incarceration. He says he even hired three staffers who had criminal records. “If you have been in prison, God help you if you want to really rebuild your life,” Webb told me. “We’ve got seven million people somehow involved in the system right now, and they need a structured way to reënter society and be productive again.” He didn’t mention it, but he is aware that the prison population in the U.S. exploded after the Clinton Administration signed tough new sentencing laws.

The issue that Webb cares about the most, and which could cause serious trouble for Hillary Clinton, is the one that Obama used to defeat her: Clinton’s record on war. In the Obama Administration, Clinton took the more hawkish position in three major debates that divided the President’s national-security team. In 2009, she was an early advocate of the troop surge in Afghanistan. In 2011, along with Samantha Power, who was then a member of the White House National Security Council staff and is now the U.N. Ambassador, she pushed Obama to attack Libyan forces that were threatening the city of Benghazi. That year, Clinton also advocated arming Syrian rebels and intervening militarily in the Syrian civil war, a policy that Obama rejected. Now, as ISIS consolidates its control over parts of the Middle East and Iran’s influence grows, Clinton is still grappling with the consequences of her original vote for the war in Iraq.

 

 

Sources:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/inevitability-trap