Team Clinton's Overconfidence
Tim Kaine may have been a good choice for running mate last week, but the Democrats’ latest email scandal has changed everything.
On Friday, Hillary Clinton’s choice of Tim Kaine as her running mate projected confidence. By Monday, it looked more like overconfidence.
“Tapping Mr. Kaine also demonstrated that Mrs. Clinton was looking past Election Day.”
For more than a month, Mrs. Clinton and her allies have been running campaign ads in battleground states, and Mr. Kaine, a senator from one such state (Virginia), is a potential plus in nearly all of them. His bilingualism could enhance her appeal among Hispanic voters in places like Florida and Colorado. His Roman Catholicism could help her in swing states with large Catholic populations such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. As a former governor of Virginia, Mr. Kaine brings executive experience and regional appeal in adjacent North Carolina, a state that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and that could be in play again this cycle.
Tapping Mr. Kaine also demonstrated that Mrs. Clinton was looking past Election Day. The senator has been a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and is respected on both sides of the aisle, which could come in handy if Democrats win the White House but not control of the House and Senate. Mrs. Clinton wanted someone with a centrist reputation who could increase her appeal among independent voters and disaffected Republicans who can’t stomach Donald Trump.
But for the Kaine choice to be met with minimum blowback, at least two preconditions had to be met. First, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who dogged Mrs. Clinton all the way to this week’s Philadelphia convention, had to be sufficiently appeased. Second, Mrs. Clinton had to convince throngs of liberal activists obsessed with racial and ethnic diversity that her choice of a white male was not a snub. This is where Team Clinton may have become too confident.
Right up until Mr. Kaine was chosen last week, Democratic strategists were stressing the party’s “unprecedented” unity. Mr. Sanders’s endorsement of Mrs. Clinton and changes made to the party’s official platform had more than satisfied progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Black Lives Matter activists, they insisted. Moreover, President and Michelle Obama will campaign vigorously for the Democratic ticket, and their popularity among black voters means Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have to worry about black turnout.
“You now have a Democratic Party that has never been more unified in the entire modern era,” Simon Rosenberg of the center-left New Democratic Network told me in an interview Friday. “The reconciliation with Sanders was hard fought but he was respected by the process, and Clinton has not gotten nearly enough credit for her deft management of that process.”
By Monday, however, it was clear that Mrs. Clinton’s management of party divisions wasn’t so deft after all and that the Democratic National Committee had something approaching contempt for the Sanders campaign. The weekend WikiLeaks email dump laid bare this deep party rift and almost guarantees that it will deepen, at least in the short run. The paper trail exposes clear attempts by the supposedly neutral DNC to undermine Mr. Sanders’s candidacy and help Mrs. Clinton win the nomination. Clinton campaign lawyers worked directly with the DNC to craft public criticisms of the Sanders campaign. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced out as head of the DNC after the email revelations, questioned Mr. Sanders’s loyalty to the party and belittled his top staff. One DNC official even suggested questioning Mr. Sanders’s Jewish faith.
It’s now clear that it wasn’t simply Mrs. Clinton’s superdelegate lead that was insurmountable. Before the first primary vote was cast in January, the Democratic National Committee had already decided to do everything in its power to make sure that the process ended with Hillary Clinton as the nominee. Bernie Sanders was wasting his time, his volunteers were wasting their energy, and his donors were wasting their money. As many Sanders supporters now see it, the fix was in from day one.
The biggest political story of 2016 has been the rise of Donald Trump and how he upended the political right. But it is not the only story. Progressives led by Mr. Sanders did something similar to Democrats, or might have but for the party’s nomination rules. The WikiLeaks emails confirmed what had long been rumored—that Democratic disunity was deep and real but that the press preferred to focus on the Republicans. More balanced coverage of party infighting may be warranted, but don’t count on it. The mainstream media’s preference for Hillary Clinton is no less obvious than the DNC’s.
Democrats had planned to spend this week presenting a united party front and contrasting it with the Republican disarray witnessed last week in Cleveland. That’s not going to happen. Like Republicans, the Democrats still have some housekeeping to do before they can turn their complete attention to the general election.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal