Clinton Distances Herself From Obama (But Not Really)

The world of professional
Clinton-watchers is abuzz this week thanks to an interview Hillary
Clinton
gave to The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. In the
interview, which The New York Times
describes as “remarkably blunt,” Clinton, the former Secretary
of State, takes a few first steps to distance herself from
President Obama, saying things like, “Great nations need organizing
principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing
principle.” Clinton also describes the Obama administration’s
inability to “build up a credible fighting force” of anti-Assad
citizens in Syria as a “failure.”

There are a handful of moderately sharp lines like that, but
there’s no real revelation. Mostly, the interview simply confirms
of what has long been known, which is that Clinton is more hawkish
than Obama, and that she’ll be willing to say so to whatever extent
she thinks it will help her politically. There aren’t a lot of
details, though. She’s not defining her differences with Obama so
much as acknowledging them. 

And as
a report in Politico this afternoon indicates, she
also doesn’t want too much distance between herself and the
president. Clinton spokesperson Nick Merrill told Politico
today that Clinton called President Obama regarding the interview,
and that it’s all just a friendly disagreement.

“Some are now choosing to hype those differences but they do not
eclipse their broad agreement on most issues,” Merrill said. “Like
any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks
forward to hugging it out when she they see each other tomorrow
night.”

The early conventional wisdom, to the extent that it exists, is
that Clinton is the clear favorite to win the presidency in 2016.
But I think this incident suggests one of the troubles she’s going
to have, should she run and win the Democratic nomination, which
seems all but certain.

She wants to suggest some differences between herself and Obama,
but not with any clarity, and not in a way that creates any real
distance between them. And she’ll probably want to keep most of
whatever differences she does reveal confined to the realm of
foreign policy, partly because that’s where her experience is, and
partly because the Democratic base isn’t likely to support major
departures in domestic policy. Which means that unless there’s some
big, unexpected break coming, she’ll essentially be running as a
slightly more hawkish version of Obama. Inevitably, that means
she’ll be tied to Obama’s less-than-popular presidency and
controversial domestic agenda. Unless Obama’s current approval
ratings improve—which of course they could over the next two
years—that’s not great a place to be.