Swift Boats and War Machines

Here's how the Clinton war machine plays the game:

1. Attack early and often. Respond to everything.
2. Attack by characterizing even the faintest criticism as the most vicious form of politics. Even if the disagreement is strictly concerned with policy, and the tones are respectful, it must be handled as a outrageous, mean-spirited assault on the Clinton in question.
3. Use proxies and spokespeople to reciprocate by characterizing opponents in the harshest terms. Those friendly parties can use more leeway to spin character assaults on opponents as merely "making sure people know the truth".
4. Use friends in the media to control the message. Urge them to wait through a news cycle before running with any story that casts the Clinton in question in a negative light. Once they do run the story, make sure counter-spin is included in the story (true or not) as a form of "balance". The wait is important, since it enables a crafted response, and reduces the possibility of hot-headed errors. If repeat-offender reporters persist in using an angle that doesn't suit the Clinton machine, threaten to deny all access in the future.
5. Stay on message. Use the same talking points via all proxies. It doesn't matter if this is entirely transparent to any observers in the media, they won't draw attention to it - and most average citizens do not consume enough media to notice the repetition.

All campaigns use these strategies to some extent, but nobody does it better than the dynamic duo from ... well, I was going to say Little Rock, but really it's wherever it's convenient to be from lately. They know how to bring their A Game.

Or do they? Now Bill Clinton is back in the fight, and he may be overreaching, early. Even the most Clinton-friendly voters might feel some disgust at the notion that the recent questions from the Obama and Edwards campaigns about Hillary's evasiveness and contradictions are a form of "swift boating". This breathtaking gall and ruthlessness from the Clinton war machine may cause many Democrats to look at each other with a sense of fear and dread, and a yearning desire to avoid hitching their fortunes to these people all over again.

If she makes it to the general election, we can expect Hillary to use this tactic again. It will work like this: She will get criticized, and Bill will respond with a incredibly withering assault, and then he'll score bonus sympathy points by claiming that he "just couldn't bear to hear people say that about his wife", etc. - thereby leveraging the wounded-spouse routine to earn a free pass for a grossly unfair and disproportionate counter-attack.

Another possibility is that the Hillary campaign will slowly implode, dragged downward by the fact that people want to get off the Bush-Clinton Presidential Bus and the obvious equivocations and forked-tongue policy positions from the candidate herself - which will seem stale and charmless in comparison to the efforts of the war machine of yore.

Tags: Politics, Elections, Swift Boating, Hillary, Bill Clinton