President Obama's 2008 presidential campaign rested on the promise of hope and change. And as Hillary Clinton finally dropped the charade and entered the 2016 race on Sunday with a campaign announcement video, her underlying message appeared to be not that same starry-eyed yearning, but a more guarded form of optimism built on the promising gains of the Obama years.
Over at The Washington Post, Greg Sargent digs into that a bit more, arguing the former secretary of state believes "swing voters and independents don't see the Obama years as quite the smoking apocalyptic hellscape Republicans continue to describe."
With the GOP hoping to terrify voters with the prospect of Hillary-as-Obama-third-term, and with the 2016 GOP hopefuls zealously vowing to roll back the Obama presidency, Republicans will likely continue re-litigating how awful the Obama years have supposedly been. The Clinton gamble is that swing voters don’t want to hear this argument anymore; that they agree Obama’s policies have not turned the economy around fast enough, but think this was understandable given the circumstances and don’t see those policies as an utter, abject failure. [The Washington Post]
To be sure, Clinton can't break too dramatically from Obama given their overlapping ideologies and her tenure in Obama's State Department. But Sargent makes a convincing case Clinton's team believes the GOP will overreach to define Obama as a failure, and voters, seeing the gains of the past eight years, will opt for four more years of the same.
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