But after a terror attack, it’s hard to see how she can reassure voters by palling around with the president.
Hillary Clinton is still holding auditions for vice president, but her most important running mate for the balance of the campaign will be President Obama, for better or worse.
“The only question for Team Clinton and the Democrats is whether Mr. Obama’s playbook will work for someone else.”
After Mr. Obama endorsed his former secretary of state last week, this newspaper reported that no sitting president in recent history “has campaigned for his party’s nominee as much as Barack Obama plans to for Hillary Clinton.” Mrs. Clinton wouldn’t have it any other way. Her campaign has been nothing if not an assiduous appeal to the young, minority and women voters who put Mr. Obama over the top in 2008 and 2012. And Mr. Obama knows that his legacy would be badly tarnished by a Clinton defeat in November.
While her Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, has drawn sharp contrasts with the administration on issues such as health care, Mrs. Clinton has by and large embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda in hopes of keeping his supporters happy. When she has broken with the president, as she did in opposing the Pacific trade accord last year, she has done so as delicately as possible. The only question for Team Clinton and the Democrats is whether Mr. Obama’s playbook will work for someone else.
By some measures, the president is well positioned to be an asset in the fall campaign. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, who left office deeply unpopular and with the economy in a free fall, Mr. Obama’s favorability rating currently rests around 50% overall and 80% among registered Democrats. With those kinds of numbers, Mrs. Clinton isn’t the only Democrat who will want the president on the stump this fall.
Still, making common cause with Mr. Obama has a potential downside for Mrs. Clinton. He’s not on the ballot this year, and bad things have happened to the party on his watch. “Democrats in the Obama era,” the political scientist Larry Sabato wrote in 2014, “have racked up net forfeitures of 11 governorships, 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 913 state legislative seats, and 30 state legislative chambers.” They lost control of the House in 2010 and the Senate four years later.
Mr. Obama has demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to remain personally popular regardless of how his policies poll. The jobs report for May, when employers added only 38,000 workers, was the weakest since 2010. The number of people not in the labor force grew by 664,000 to a record 94.7 million. Labor-force participation is at its lowest level in nearly four decades. Some two-thirds of voters say the country is moving in the wrong direction. And more people continue to disapprove than approve of ObamaCare, the president’s signature achievement.
Yet Mr. Obama’s approval rating has risen by nearly 10 points in the past year and is in the respectable mid-40s in the battleground states that are expected to decide the next election. Incumbent parties tend to get blamed for the country’s economic conditions, and Mr. Obama’s ability (so far) to deflect responsibility is exceptional. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are betting that it’s also transferable.
Mrs. Clinton’s embrace of the administration’s policies on national security and foreign affairs could also backfire and provide an opening for her Republican rival. Donald Trump has made antiterrorism a centerpiece of his candidacy. He reminds people that Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is a product of this administration’s wrongheaded decisions. He is telling voters that Mr. Obama refuses to properly identify the enemy, that America’s strategy isn’t working, that Islamic State is striking at will and that the shooting rampages in Orlando and San Bernardino are the proof.
Mr. Trump will link Mrs. Clinton to a bad nuclear deal with Iran and a stupendously ineffective antiterror policy that the administration, with its obsession for political correctness, refuses to adjust. It does not much matter that Mr. Trump has yet to put forth a coherent national security plan of his own. What matters is that 49 innocents were slaughtered in a city best known for Disney World by a terrorist who pledged allegiance to ISIS—and that Democrats from Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton on down insist the root problem is gun control.
Foreign affairs should be a winning issue for a nominee who once served as the nation’s top diplomat, especially given that she’s running against someone with no foreign-policy experience. But polls show voters essentially split on whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would keep the nation safer, and the Orlando massacre could give Mr. Trump the edge. It’s hard to see how palling around with Mr. Obama between now and November will burnish Mrs. Clinton’s commander-in-chief credentials.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
______________________
Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal