NRI appointed
Hillary Clinton campaign's policy director of 2008 presidential
election
New York, Jan. 26, 2007
Sudeep Bhalla
Neera Tanden, a senior vice president for Academic Affairs at
the Center for American Progress, has been appointed
Hillary Clinton campaign's policy director of 2008 presidential
election.
Prior to joing Academic Affairs at the Center for American Progress
Center, she was Legislative Director for Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton (D-NY). Before that Neera was the senior vice president
for Domestic Policy for the Center for American Progress. Neera
was the issues director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee. She has also served as the senior policy advisor to
the Chancellor of the New York City Schools, Harold Levy. Prior
to that she was the deputy campaign manager and policy director
for the senate campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Neera also
served in the White House under President Clinton as the senior
policy advisor to the First Lady and associate director in the
Domestic Policy Council.
She graduated from UCLA and received her law degree from Yale
Law School in 1996. She began her political ascent by volunteering
for then Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis’ presidential
campaign in 1988. At age 18, she was a precinct leader and she
encouraged all of the young people in the audience to get similarly
involved no matter how young they were.
According to The American Prospect, Inc, she said: As George
W. Bush grows accustomed to job-approval ratings in the middle
30’s, the number of explanations for his travails seems
to increase by the day. In this case it’s not success, but
failure that has a thousand fathers: the bungling of Katrina,
his drive to privatize Social Security, the mistakes in Iraq,
even obstructionist Democrats. The list goes on.
But here’s another theory: The president’s low approval
ratings are the result of the intensely negative type of campaign
he chose to run.
A campaign forms the basis for the public’s expectations
of how the candidate will govern once in office. And Bush, instead
of telling Americans what he had accomplished and what he would
do once reelected, ran the most negative presidential campaign
in history. He spent $177 million on the highest number of negative
ads -- a whopping 101,000 -- and the lowest number of positive
ads of any presidential campaign in modern time. And he was the
incumbent! He won by the narrowest margin of any incumbent since
1828, but he won.
The focus on an almost purely negative campaign meant that he
built little support across the country for his agenda. But Bush
and his team failed to see this. Believing their own hype, they
saw the election results as an affirmation of their key policies,
but in fact they were nothing of the sort because those key policies
were hardly even discussed. Social Security is the most obvious
example. Sure, Bush mentioned privatization as part of his stump
speech. But he discussed privatization just five times during
the debates, while he mentioned Iraq 73 times. And The New York
Times and The Washington Post ran only two stories apiece on the
subject during the campaign. A campaign in which Bush had spelled
out his proposals would have been a campaign in which we would
have had an actual debate about privatization. But Bush kept his
plans for Social Security intentionally vague during the campaign.
He didn’t want the debate in the short term, but in the
long term, he damaged himself.
On Iraq as well, Bush said the election affirmed his policy.
“We had an accountability moment, and that’s called
the 2004 elections,” he told The Washington Post. A year
later, given the 35 percent approval rating for his handling of
Iraq, clearly the American people wish the accountability moment
had lasted a bit longer. It is obvious to all but the most partisan
of supporters that the 2004 election was not an affirmation of
President Bush’s Iraq war plan.
But there is a deeper way in which Bush’s campaign has
dictated his downward trajectory.
In campaigns, the attacks that candidates make against their
opponents define them almost as much as their positive agenda
by creating a negative narrative of their opponents. Candidates
use their negative message to highlight a contrast with their
opponent that helps define themselves positively. Bush laid out
a clear message about his opponent -- John Kerry was a flip-flopper
who couldn’t be trusted to fight the war on terror. This
reinforced his campaign’s narrative that Bush was strong
and resolute and would not flinch. When Bush did something unpopular,
he turned it to his advantage by saying he did what he thought
was right and didn’t follow the polls. He wouldn’t
be one to zigzag.
But now we see the downside of this message of resoluteness:
Bush has made it difficult to change course to reflect new realities.
And though he has made some changes in his time (he was against
a new Homeland Security Department before he was for it), for
the most part he has held on to failing policies despite changed
circumstances. So he has stayed the course in Iraq despite ample
evidence that this has made the occupation more dangerous for
U.S. soldiers. Similarly, he has passed more tax cuts despite
massive deficits, and maintained every member of his senior team
even until one was indicted. What used to be resoluteness is now
a stubbornness divorced from the reality Americans see every day.
His inability to change course furthers the sense that he’s
out of touch with people’s concerns.
When he does change course, it seems disingenuous and political.
So, rather than receive a positive bump when he uncharacteristically
apologizes for the mismanagement of Katrina, or withdraws his
nomination of Harriet Miers, as most politicians would, Bush’s
downward trajectory continues. If he changed course dramatically
on issue after issue Bush would become that which he has maligned.
