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In Clinton, voters see a long résumé but a short list of accomplishments

The Debrief:?An occasional series offering a reporter’s insights

By Karen Tumulty September 10 at 9:00 AM
Washington Post

For nearly a quarter-century, Hillary Rodham Clinton has played an outsized role in the nation’s consciousness as an advocate and a political survivor. Her presidential campaign’s favorite way to describe her is as “a fighter.”

But something surprising has emerged in public opinion about the former first lady, senator and secretary of state. Asked to name something tangible that Clinton has actually accomplished, many voters come up blank.

It happened when Bloomberg News posed the question in May to a focus group of 10 Iowa Democrats. They praised Clinton for strength, experience and competence but could not recall a single thing she had done.

In their own polls and focus groups, Republicans have seen the same thing. And they are sensing a vulnerability in Clinton’s record that could compound the difficulties she is already facing with the controversy over her decision as secretary of state to use a private e-mail account and server rather than a government one.

“While her e-mail scandal has badly damaged Clinton’s public image and raised questions about her judgment, her failed leadership in public life may be what actually hurts Clinton the most among voters in the long run,” said Jeff Bechdel, communications director for America Rising, a super PAC dedicated to producing opposition research about Democrats.
Clinton's evolving stance on her private e-mail server
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During an interview with ABC News, Hillary Clinton apologized for using a private e-mail server during her time as secretary or state. Here are past statements where the presidential hopeful neglected to take personal responsibility for the controversy. (The Washington Post)

Clinton’s team also recognizes that while her credentials are well-known, her achievements are not. That was part of her message in a speech Wednesday supporting the Iran nuclear deal, which was negotiated by her successor John Kerry. Clinton spotlighted her own role in bringing Tehran to the table.

[In break with Obama, Clinton presents tougher worldview]

One Clinton aide, speaking on background to frankly discuss campaign strategy, said the message she wanted to send about the Iran deal is this: “I’m owning it. I have the president’s back, and I’m making this part of my legacy too.”

Clinton’s tenure as first lady is remembered most for her politically disastrous effort to transform the health care system. In the Senate, she was a relatively junior member with few legislative victories that bear her name. And as secretary of state, she was carrying out President Obama’s agenda in an administration where diplomatic policy-making was tightly controlled by the White House.

When it came to stopping Iran from obtaining the ability to build a nuclear weapon, “I voted for sanctions again and again as a senator from New York. But they weren’t having much effect. Most of the world still did business with Iran. We needed to step up our game,” she said Wednesday in her speech at the Brookings Institution.

“So President Obama and I pursued a two-prong strategy: pressure and engagement. We made it clear that the door to diplomacy was open if Iran answered the concerns of the international community in a serious and credible way,” she said. “I traveled the world, capital by capital, twisting arms to help build the global coalition that produced some of the most effective sanctions in history,” she said.

She’s in a race to define that legacy herself, before the Republicans do it for her.



Where Clinton boasts of having logged nearly 1 million miles during her years as the nation’s chief diplomat, GOP presidential contender Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, has said: “Like Mrs. Clinton, I too have traveled the globe. But unlike her I have actually accomplished something. Flying is not an accomplishment. It is an activity.”

A day after launching his campaign for president in June, former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) took a similarly dismissive tone in comparing his record and Clinton’s: “As a senator, I think she’s passed — she has her name on three laws in eight years. ... I honestly don’t know what her successes are.”

Nor are Republicans the only ones making that argument.

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, a longshot contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, claims a record of raising the minimum wage, devoting more money to infrastructure, improving education and lowering violent crime.

It is hard to mistake the contrast that he is trying to draw with Clinton when he says: “All of those things required executive discipline and the executive method of actually getting things done instead of just talking about getting things done.”

When Clinton ran for president the first time in 2008, her chief strategist Mark Penn called her “famous but really unknown.”

Her current campaign aides believe that is still the case, as evidenced by her first ads, which focused heavily on her biography.

Yet some of what she touts as accomplishments have been disputed. In a five-minute video released on the eve of her campaign’s formal launch in June, she suggested that she was the force behind the expansion of health coverage to children in the 1990s.

After her push for universal health care failed, she said in the video, “I was really disappointed. But you have to get up off the floor and you keep fighting. So I got to thinking, let’s see what we can do to help kids?”

In fact, however, that legislation was created and driven by two senators, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). At one point, then-President Bill Clinton turned against it, fearing that it would destroy a balanced-budget deal, and Hillary Clinton defended her husband, saying: “He had to safeguard the budget proposal.”

But she did come to Kennedy’s assistance when the children’s health insurance measure was resurrected, lobbying privately within the White House for it. Kennedy, who had been furious at what he considered an initial betrayal by both Clintons, later said she was “of invaluable help.”

In part, her difficulty in defining her accomplishments comes from the fact that her role, by definition, was a supportive one in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. And her tenure in the Senate came at a time when the institution was largely known for partisan gridlock.

Her allies insist that her values come through in the fights she has chosen, even if they have not yielded the results she wanted.

“People are not looking for a punch list of things that somebody’s done,” said Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who is working for Priorities USA, the pro-Clinton super PAC. “They’re more concerned whether somebody’s got the strength and the toughness and the determination to get something done for the American people, and the people that I talk to see all of those things in Hillary Clinton.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-clinton-voters-see-a-long-resume-but-a-short-list-of-accomplishments/2015/09/09/fff3fc60-573e-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html