Shrum's Advice

Shrum has had a lot of bad luck in Presidential politics, but he seems right here:

If (although I strongly suspect the right word is "when") Hillary Clinton loses tomorrow's New Hampshire primary, there will be a few proto-obituaries for her campaign and many more stories about how it will be "shaken up" or "relaunched."

...The flaw wasn't just the attempt to go back to the future, to the 1990s, but that the Clintons picked the wrong year in that decade. Instead of 1992, when Bill was the personification of change, their model was 1996. So Hillary ran as a pseudo-incumbent, with a selection of bite-size proposals and an abundance of caution and transparent calculation. Why would any campaign ever explicitly announce a tour to make the candidate "likable"? Or, as happened when the beleaguered Clinton machine sputtered into New Hampshire, that they now had a plan for her to be spontaneous and actually answer audience questions?

...She will have to get off the mat and recast her case. Contrary to the caricatures, Hillary Clinton is a real person, often funny in private, with engaging qualities that have been well-hidden in this campaign. But the hour is late and even if the real Hillary emerges, voters might see it as just another contrivance.

...Moreover, the wave that is rising across the country is steadily eroding her lead in national polls. She has probably spent much of the $100 million that she's raised, and last week her big givers were being urgently importuned to raise more. Incredibly, the one-time Dem juggernaut may struggle financially to reach Feb. 5.

So it's a long shot, with one and only one possible road to recovery: Let Hillary be Hillary. Throw away the product packaging - those poll-tested small-bites of policy - and set out a big case about what she wants to do in the next four years, not what she has done for the past 35.