How to back Hillary into a corner

One afternoon in late September, David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and most trusted political aide, slipped into Hillary Clinton’s stately red-brick home on Whitehaven Street in Washington, D.C., to lay out his vision for her 2016 presidential campaign. The Clintons have always made a habit of courting their most talented tormenters, so it wasn’t surprising that she would call on the man who masterminded her 2008 defeat as she finds herself besieged by Republicans replaying Plouffe’s greatest hits.

Over the next couple of hours, Plouffe told Clinton and two of her closest advisers—longtime aide Cheryl Mills and John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and now Obama’s White House counselor—what she needed to do to avoid another surprise upset. His advice, according to two people with knowledge of the session, looked a lot like Obama’s winning strategy in 2012: First, prioritize the use of real-time analytics, integrating data into every facet of her operation in a way Clinton’s clumsy, old-school campaign had failed to do in 2008. Second, clearly define a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond the mere facts of her celebrity and presumed electability, rooting her campaign in a larger Democratic mission of economic equality. Third, settle on one, and only one, core messaging strategy and stick with it, to avoid the tactical, news cycle-driven approach that Plouffe had exploited so skillfully against her in the 2008 primaries.

In Plouffe’s view, articulated in the intervening years, Clinton had been too defensive, too reactive, too aware of her own weaknesses, too undisciplined in 2008. His team would goad her into making mistakes, knowing that run-of-the-mill campaign attacks (like Obama’s claim she merely had “tea,” not serious conversation, with world leaders as first lady) would get under her skin and spur a self-destructive overreaction (Clinton responded to the tea quip by falsely portraying a 1990s goodwill trip to Bosnia with the comedian Sinbad as a dangerous wartime mission). She was too easily flustered.

Plouffe’s last and most pressing point was about timing. A couple of weeks earlier, Clinton had told an audience in Mexico City, “I am going to be making a decision ... probably after the first of the year, about whether I’m going to run again or not.” The comment alarmed top Democrats: The Republican attack machine was already revving up, running anti-Hillary focus groups to figure out her vulnerabilities, dispatching opposition researchers to Arkansas, churning out anti-Hillary books and creating Fox News-fodder talking points to cast her State Department tenure as a failure and her campaign-to-be as a third-term extension of Obama’s increasingly unpopular presidency.

Now Plouffe, with the politesse of a man accustomed to padding around a president,  implored her to start assembling a campaign as soon as possible and to dispense with the coy fiction that she’s not running in 2016. “Why not?” he asked. “They are already going after you.”

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Clinton didn’t need to be told she’s under attack. She is, after all, the woman who coined the term “war room” and sees campaigns as exercises in personal, not just political, destruction. Over the years, Clinton has told friends that presidential elections aren’t won or lost by attacking an opponent’s weaknesses. “They beat you by going after your strengths,” she is fond of saying, according to one longtime aide, alluding to the Swift Boat-style assaults perfected by Republican strategist Karl Rove.

What’s striking today, however, is just how formidable those strengths appear to be heading into the 2016 presidential contest, a campaign that Hillary Clinton will start—and, yes, secret strategy sessions such as the one with Plouffe indicate she is virtually certain to run—as an unusually prohibitive favorite, especially in comparison with potential GOP contenders. “She’s not perfect,” joked one of Obama’s longtime advisers, “but something beats nothing, and they’ve got nothing.”

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OPTICS: Inside the singular world of Clinton diehards. (Click to view gallery.) | Photograph by Chris Hinkle

Six years ago, it was her own party that tripped up Clinton, but this time the vast majority of Democrats (about two-thirds of them favored Clinton in fall polls, with Vice President Joe Biden a distant second) see Clinton as a suitable standard-bearer, even as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has become the darling of the party’s progressive wing. Warren has said she won’t run against Clinton, and the likelihood that Clinton will face any serious competition in the primaries, much less an Obama-like juggernaut, remains remote. She has access to the best talent her party can muster (in addition to Plouffe, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, and his analytics and field gurus, Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird, have already committed to helping Clinton). She will raise vast sums with ease, and Clinton insiders say she seems determined to play directly to perhaps her biggest political asset this time: her historic appeal as the first woman with a real shot at the White House.

As strong as Clinton appears to be, Republicans today are as weak and divided as they were on the eve of the disastrous 2012 primary season, with the party torn between the competing imperatives of assuaging its hard-right Tea Party wing and searching out a nominee who will have the best general-election shot against Clinton. The field is going to be crowded, young, credible and contentious, with Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as likely contestants, and Chris Christie, Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush as maybes. Inevitably, a standard-bearer will emerge, but 79 percent of Republican voters couldn’t identify a candidate they were enthusiastic about, according to a CBS/New York Timespoll taken in September.

Which is where Clinton comes in: There’s nothing like a common enemy to bring a fractious party together, and she is precisely t...