Hillary Clinton needs more than star power to win in 2016

Hillary Clinton doesn’t just run for President now as a former First Lady and former United States senator and former secretary of state. She runs out of the party of being famous in America. She runs as a star.

But a problem for her is that we elected a star in Barack Obama eight years ago and now just about everybody who wants to succeed him is telling us how lousy that turned out.

There are actually more problems than that for Hillary Clinton as she tries to rebrand herself for the last time, at the age of 67. It starts with what feels like an old face of the Democratic Party trying to convince the country that she has something new to offer; convince the country that she can win the presidency if the Republicans run anybody credible against her, and by credible that means somebody who’s not scary and nuts, which means Jeb Bush.

And maybe she can convince enough voters that they have another opportunity to feel as noble and high-minded electing a woman as they did electing a black man in 2008. We made history that time, did we ever. This time around, voters might simply be looking for somebody who can make this country work again, at a time when things look and feel so miserable for so many despite the bow the current President tries to put on things on his way out the door.

“Everyday Americans need a champion,” was the tweet from Hillary Clinton Sunday, “and I want to be that champion.”

The campaign that officially began Sunday can’t and won’t be the kind of thrilling race that we got when it was Obama vs. Clinton in ’08, despite the obscene amount of money about to be spent on it. More likely this will be a race to the bottom instead of one about elevating new ideas, with candidates from both parties trying to destroy each other.

But what happens if the Republican Party isn’t completely suicidal coming out of the primary season this time? At that point Hillary Clinton has to be something she has never been in her life, certainly not when she was beating guys like Rick Lazio and John Spencer to get herself elected to the U.S. Senate out of this state:

She actually has to be a good candidate, one able to connect with voters instead of just money-whipping them.

“She also has the challenge of describing what her accomplishments are,” one Democratic strategist told me Sunday, “and I’m not sure what those are. And she has to generate some excitement, and get people to care, about something so long coming.”

Again: She is a huge political star. Everybody knows her, and knows her name. But in a country more cynical about government than ever before, with things getting worse instead of better for the bottom 80% in America, it is going to take more than star power to get elected President this time, and promises to the middle class that sound as old as Brooklyn, where her headquarters are located.

 

“The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” she said in her video.

Of course she is as smart and competent as she is ambitious, and would probably make an excellent CEO in the White House. You will hear a lot about how much experience she has, and how she was in the room when her husband was President, and when Obama was treating her like more of a vice president than the actual vice president. It will mean nothing in the end if she can’t connect with voters better than she did when she ran against Obama; if her own political instincts aren’t better this time, no matter how much smarter her handlers are.

She really was treated as the de facto vice president by Barack Obama in that “60 Minutes” appearance he made with her when she was stepping down as Secretary of State. She was once again a complete White House insider. So it will be interesting to see her try to run now as some kind of change candidate. Because if she thought things needed changing, why didn’t she tell us?

But then this was one more good, practical political deal for the Clintons. The President shamelessly sold out Joe Biden the way he did, and in return he got the support of not just Hillary but — and much more importantly — he got the big dog, Bill Clinton, in the same deal. And everybody involved with this contract immediately developed amnesia about the things Bill Clinton had said about Obama in the ’08 campaign.

His wife’s ’16 campaign begins now. This time around there is no serious challenger, at least not yet. Sometimes you get the idea that she’s the one running as an incumbent. One last time, a huge political star tries to prove she’s a real political candidate in something more than a video, and not just in 140 characters or less.