Attacking Hillary Clinton on her multitudinous scandals has gotten Donald Trump’s campaign even with her, but to put the final nails in Clinton’s electoral coffin Trump must also challenge and campaign against her policies; attacking her on scandals alone plays to what may be her strongest point—the ability to weather a crisis—and may not close the deal with independent voters and reluctant Republicans.
Donald Trump has, through the revelations about Hillary Clinton’s scandals and the sheer force of will of his grassroots supporters, surpassed Hillary Clinton in several national polls and drawn even with her in the Electoral College match-up.
But, to paraphrase James Carville, Mrs. Clinton’s longtime chief apologist: It’s not the scandals, it’s her ideas stupid!
Yes, the mind-boggling revelations about the venality, conflicts of interest and prima facie illegal conduct by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state set forth in the Judicial Watch lawsuit, Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash and the FBI report would have driven any Republican from the presidential race and straight into an interview room at their local U.S. Attorney’s office.
There would have been a stampede of donors disavowing such a Republican candidate and a legion of elected officials and others withdrawing their endorsements, while the conservative pundit class would have demanded the candidate’s head on a platter.
But Democrats do not think like Republicans.
As far as we can tell, the revelations in the Judicial Watch lawsuit, Clinton Cash and the FBI report cost Hillary only the support of a few obscure Democratic-leaning donors, while no major sitting Democratic elected official—senator, representative or governor—has jumped ship.
Establishment Republicans can’t grasp the fact that, while the Clintons and their team are terrible at crisis avoidance, they wrote the book on how to weather a crisis—it’s what they do every day, and they do it better than anyone.
Bill Clinton was on the verge of an expected victory in New Hampshire, when his campaign faced the biggest media feeding frenzy of the 1992 presidential campaign cycle. As The Washington Post put it ever so delicately, “allegations arose of an extramarital affair with Arkansas state employee and cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers.”
Clinton faced down the press with a series of boldfaced lies and went on to defeat incumbent establishment Republican President George H.W. Bush whose acknowledged heroism in World War II and veneer of old fashioned New England Protestant rectitude gained him not a single vote he didn’t already have.
The reason Bush lost was not a shortage of Clinton scandal—it was a failure to draw a clear conservative contrast with what the election of Bill Clinton might mean: “giving” Americans health care, more taxes, more spending—in short the policies that promptly handed control of Congress over to Republicans in the very next election.
Those who remain fixated on Hillary Clinton’s scandals seem immune to history.
They just can’t grasp that scandalmongering isn’t going to defeat Hillary Clinton. Scandals are a part of the Clinton package that has already been accepted by Hillary’s base in the Democratic Party and they are already starting to seem like old news to general election voters who are just now beginning to think about making a decision about who to vote for, for president.
Does that mean Donald Trump should ignore the scandals? No, of course not.
But it does mean that Trump and his campaign must stop treating them like a silver bullet and start telling voters what the election of Hillary Clinton would mean, drawing a sharp and clear contrast between the conservative policies he espouses and those far-left policies which Hillary Clinton has promised to implement should she be elected.
First, and most importantly, Trump ought to be asking if voters really want the third term of the disastrous Obama presidency.
Mrs. Clinton supports Obama’s unconstitutional use of executive power to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Those who have expressed fear for the future of constitutional government under Obama ought to be in abject terror at the thought of Hillary Clinton with unfettered executive power.
The Republican establishment candidates never made the use of executive power an issue during the primaries, no doubt because they secretly support the amnesty for illegal aliens that Obama’s use of executive power has achieved.
Mrs. Clinton is also a firm believer in manmade global warming or “climate change” saying, “The science of climate change is unforgiving, no matter what the deniers may say; sea levels are rising, ice caps are melting, storms, droughts and wildfires are wreaking havoc.”
This would appear to lead her to support any number of policies that would wreak further havoc on the U.S. economy, particularly in coal country and the coal-dependent Midwest. Trump should be hammering Clinton in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio—key presidential election states where her policies would send thousands, if not millions, to the unemployment lines and drive up electricity prices for those who still had jobs.
Finally, Hillary Clinton has firmly embraced the far-left social agenda on same-sex marriage, abortion and the purging of religious belief from the public square. The Democratic Convention couldn’t even fly the flag until day two and the delegates who booed the mention of God and purged religious references from the Democratic Party Platform in 2012 are the core of Mrs. Clinton’s base.
These far-left secular liberals are so far out of sync with majority opinion in America it’s as if they were on another planet.
Trump has promised stand for religious liberty and against liberal bigotry against believers, which has proven to be the majority opinion every time it has been put to the test.
These are just three of many areas where Trump can and should campaign against Hillary Clinton on her truly radical ideas and policies, instead of playing to her strongest point—the ability to weather a crisis.
Republicans never win the big national elections unless they draw a clear contrast between the conservative worldview and the liberal Democratic worldview.
Donald Trump has laid out a conservative policy agenda and avoided the usual Republican mistakes of running a content-free campaign or worse yet, campaigning as a Democrat-lite. But talking about Mrs. Clinton’s scandals rather than drawing a clear conservative contrast between her far-left progressive worldview and the conservative worldview will only carry Trump so far.
The upcoming debate will be a good opportunity for Trump to move the campaign into contrast mode and seal the deal with the 70 percent of voters who think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
George Rasley is editor of ConservativeHQ, a member of American MENSA and a veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2008. He served as lead advance representative for Governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and has served as a staff member, consultant or advance representative for some of America’s most recognized conservative Republican political figures, including President Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. He served in policy and communications positions on the House and Senate staff, and during the George H.W. Bush administration he served on the White House staff of Vice President Dan Quayle.
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