Fund-Raisers Show Clinton’s Obama Strategy

WASHINGTON — What does the Bill and Hillary Clinton Fund-Raising Tour, starting in New York this week, moving on to Washington on Tuesday, and concluding in Los Angeles this weekend, tell us about the New York senator’s strategy in dealing with rising challenger Senator Obama?Size matters. Everything about this week’s event in Washington screamed big. From the ballroom at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, designed to hold more than 3,000 people, to the Patton-esque flag backdrop, to 1,000-plus donors, to the price tag for entry — from $1,000 to $4,200, the maximum any individual can give to a federal campaign — every detail of the event was on the larger-than-life scale that only a front-runner and longtime Washington fixture can pull off.A former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton’s, Terry McAuliffe, introduced the power couple and gleefully announced that the event raised $2.7 million.“This cycle, we are going to raise …” Mr. McAuliffe paused for dramatic effect, and the 40 or 50 reporters gathered leaned forward. “Ten trillion dollars!” he exclaimed, and the crowd laughed.The figure was not a true throwing-down of the gauntlet, but it indicated that the Clinton presidential campaign is one of the few for which money will not be an object. Mr. Obama is likely to be Mrs. Clinton’s best-funded rival for the Democratic nomination, and he has already demonstrated fundraising prowess in Hollywood and his home base of Chicago. But Mr. and Mrs. Clinton clearly are reemphasizing that they are biggest dogs on the block.Another part of Mrs. Clinton’s strategy is experience, more than just as senator.A key line in Mr. Obama’s stump speech acknowledges his mere two years in federal office: “People say that I haven’t been in Washington that long, but I have been in Washington long enough that I know that Washington needs to change, and I think I can be an agent for change in Washington.” He also refers extensively to his early career as a community organizer in Chicago, painting himself as an outsider to Washington, yet an effective leader.In introducing his wife on Tuesday, Mr. Clinton spent a lot of time going over Mrs. Clinton’s career after she graduated from Yale Law School and before she became first lady. He seemed at times to be emphasizing that she, too, had worked to organize communities, from her early work with the Children’s Defense Fund to her appointment on the board of the Legal Services Corporation by President Carter.Also, Mr. Clinton’s reference to his wife’s visits to 82 countries as first lady garnered a surprising level of applause from the crowd. Her supporters may be eager to demonstrate that Mr. Obama’s boyhood years in Indonesia and short time in Kenya with his father are not as unique as the popular narrative suggests.“Long before she was a public official, she was dedicated to public service,” Mr. Clinton said, noting that as one of a few female Yale Law graduates, she could “write her own ticket.”A reference to Mrs. Clinton’s failed effort to reform health care as first lady garnered applause, and the former president said, “The legend of our health care plan has been pretty well destroyed” — apparently contending that it was not as bad as critics said and that the country would have been better off had it passed.The inability to get a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a health care reform plan has long been seen as one of Mrs. Clinton’s greatest mistakes, but in the upcoming primary she may wave it like a bloody shirt, reminding voters that she was fighting for one of their highest policy priorities more than a decade ago.“No one knows how hard this is going to be better than I do,” Mrs. Clinton said, as the crowd shared a knowing laugh. “I have the scars to show for it.”One more part of her strategy: She is proudly partisan.A popular element of Mr. Obama’s message is his lament of partisanship as the primary obstacle to solving American’s problems. But such a “pox on both their houses” message implies that Democrats share part of the blame for problems in Washington, and it carries risks in primaries dominated by voters who are the party’s true believers.Nothing of the sort appears in Mrs. Clinton’s current rhetoric; the candidate who stirs some of the highest approval and disapproval ratings is probably the wrong one to lament excessive partisanship and division in the electorate.Instead, her off-the-cuff remarks Tuesday hit all of the “anger points” of a typical Democrat: “Halliburton no-bid contracts,” “the anti-science attitude of this administration,” “people still living in trailers outside New Orleans.”Her one reference to partisanship was drowned out by applause, and even that was a reference to one of the Bush administration’s faults.“I want to get back to evidence-based decision making,” she said to great fanfare, and then added a jab: “Only this administration could turn that sentence into an applause line.”In the audience Tuesday night were not merely former Clinton Cabinet members, holding a reunion of their own in a separate suite before the main fund-raiser, but a healthy chunk of Washington’s professional Democrat class. When Mrs. Clinton deployed the usual pledge that the aspirations of her candidacy were not about her but about “all of us,” she perhaps was adding an inadvertent bit of irony: A large percentage of her Tuesday audience probably will be seeking jobs in a second Clinton administration.Mr. Obama has reached out to several former staffers of the Senate majority leader between mid-2001 and early 2003, Tom Daschle, and a former senator from New Jersey who ran for president in 2000, Bill Bradley.But the center of gravity in Democratic presidential politics has been with the Clintons since 1992; professional partisans and operatives with no connections to the couple are few and far between.

Fund-Raisers Show Clinton’s Obama Strategy

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