Some of Hillary’s pledges sound great. Until you remember who’s the president

The puzzle that is currently frustrating the pundit minds of America is this: Why is Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, not simply clobbering Donald Trump, her Republican rival? How is this ranting, seething buffoon still competitive with her? Trump has now stumbled through a series of the kind of blunders that break ordinary political campaigns — the sort of deadly hypocrisies that always kill the demagogue in old movies. And yet, this particular demagogue keeps on trucking. Why?

Let us answer that burning pundit question of today by jumping to what will undoubtedly be the next great object of pundit ardour: The legacy of United States President Barack Obama. Two months from now, when all the TV wise men are playing historians and giving their estimation on where Obama ranks in the pantheon of great American presidents, they will probably neglect to mention that his legacy helped determine Hillary’s fortunes in this election cycle. As a beloved figure among Democrats, for example, Obama was instrumental in securing the nomination for her. As a president who has accomplished little since 2011, however, Obama has pretty much undermined Hillary’s ability to sell America on another centrist Democratic presidency. His legacy has diluted her promise.

The reform impulse just keeps short-circuiting every time the Democrats try to switch it on.

Let me put this slightly differently. Hillary has lots of good policy ideas. She promises many fine things. That these things do not attract more voters to her side is (as many have noted) partially due to her wonkish way of presenting them. But it is even more because of the glaring contradiction between the nice things she says she will do and the failure of Obama to advance the ball very far on those same issues.

I was pleased to learn, for example, that this year’s Democratic Platform included strong language on antitrust enforcement, and that Hillary had hinted that she intended to take the matter up as president. Hooray! Taking on too-powerful corporations would be healthy, I thought when I first learned that, and also enormously popular. But then it dawned on me: Antitrust enforcement is largely up to the president and his picked advisers. If Democrats really think it is so damned important, why has Hillary’s old Obama done so very, very little with it?

Or take this headline from just a few days ago: ‘Clinton promises to hold Wells Fargo accountable’. Go get ‘em, Hillary! To see a president get tough with elite bankers and with CEOs in general — that’s something all of America can cheer for. But then that nagging voice piped up again: If Democrats think it is so critical to get tough with crooked banksters, why oh why didn’t Obama take the many, many opportunities he had to do so back in the days when it would have really mattered?

Where this contradiction gets particularly toxic is on the issue of trade. This is the locomotive of dissatisfaction that Trump means to ride into the White House, and Hillary has tried desperately to neutralise the issue by announcing that she, too, opposes the hated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and that she, too, deplores the unfortunate effects certain trade deals have had. And then you open the newspaper and find that her presidential patron and protector, Obama, is still pushing the TPP in order to secure his legacy.

The Democrats talk about healthcare — and immediately have to say things like this about Obamacare: “It’s a heck of a lot better than starting from scratch.” They talk about getting college tuition under control — and everyone remembers that the problem is decades old and that the Dems have done virtually nothing about it all these years. What was without a doubt the worst moment of them all came at the Democratic Convention back in July, when Senator Elizabeth Warren pronounced on the current state of middle America as follows: “Look around ... [Some] Americans ... working two or three jobs, but wages stay flat. Meanwhile, the basic costs of making it from month to month keep going up. Housing, health care, child care — costs are out of sight. Young people are getting crushed by student loans. Working people are in debt. Seniors can’t stretch a social security cheque to cover the basics.”

It was a powerful indictment of what Warren called a “rigged” system — except for one thing: That system is presided over by Obama, a man that same Democratic Convention was determined to apotheosise as one of the greatest politicians of all times.

It doesn’t really help matters to claim, as the most ardent Obama defenders do, that the US president was powerless before Congress, and that it was therefore impossible for Obama to do anything differently than what he did during his eight years in White House. Such fanciful talk may help Americans to feel better about the current occupant of the Oval Office, but it also negates his would-be successor’s promises more effectively than any lesser argument you may make against them. It transforms a vote for Hillary from mildly distasteful to almost totally futile.

The immediate problem for Democrats this year is simple, really: It is hard to criticise power when your own leader is the most powerful person in the land.

The larger problem facing them is the terminal irrelevance of their great, overarching campaign theme. Remember the “man from Hope”? “Hope is on the way”? “Keep hope alive”? Well, this year “hope” is most assuredly dead. Thanks to Obama’s flagrant hope-dealing in the dark days of 2008 — followed up by his failure to reverse the disintegration of the middle class — this favourite Democratic cliche has finally become just that: An empty phrase. Today, as the Democrats go into battle against Trump, they find that their rallying cry has lost its magic. Hillary is discovering how difficult it is to win an election without hope.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Thomas Frank’s most recent book is Listen, Liberal.