In what was universally described as a bid for millennial support, Hillary Clinton went to Florida today and unveiled a full-fledged national service proposal. For us old-timers, it was a nostalgic moment, as I explained at New York:

Millennials themselves won’t remember this, but Bill Clinton made national service a major theme in his 1992 presidential campaign, and managed to create a full-time national-service program, known as AmeriCorps, before Republicans took over Congress and began a guerrilla campaign to kill or at least starve the initiative.

What’s interesting about Hillary Clinton’s current proposal is that she seeks to significantly expand AmeriCorps — tripling its size and doubling the post-service education benefit — while directly connecting it to the kind of part-time, uncompensated voluntarism Republicans tend to prefer as an alternative to national service. Her proposed National Service Reserve would mobilize for emergencies or other urgent public priorities up to 5 million Americans, with the expanded AmeriCorps membership deployed to “recruit, train and lead” them. This hybrid approach of full-time and occasional service was endorsed by George W. Bush, who made it the centerpiece of one of his State of the Union addresses, and has won over several other prominent Republicans, notably Colin Powell and John McCain.

This proposal and the themes it allows Clinton to invoke are clearly a twofer in her efforts to drive up her support levels among millennials. The ethic of service is valued highly by young Americans, and a robust post-service educational grant nicely complements Clinton’s other proposals to make college more affordable.

Lord only knows if or how Trump may respond. He has a generation’s worth of conservative smears against AmeriCorps to draw upon, up to and including comparisons to the Hitler Youth (a particularly common if psychotic characterization made when Obama proposed an AmeriCorps expansion). If her proposal becomes a significant moment in the campaign, and she wins, it could either be the basis of a rare bipartisan opportunity in 2017, or another idea for Republicans to demonize because of its doubled-down connection to the Clintons. Any way you look at it, fighting for national service has become something of a family tradition.

TAGS:POLITICSHILLARY CLINTON

As we continue to sort through the implications of the first presidential candidates debate, there is a particular area of the electorate Hillary Clinton’s campaign is surely focusing on, as I discussed at New York:

According to Jeff Stein at Vox, there is some (admittedly limited) evidence her performance in the first candidate debate helped her among millennials.

It’s not that she took millennial votes away from Donald Trump. He doesn’t have many. As Harvard’s John Della Volpe, who conducted a debate-night focus group of young voters, told Stein: “The millennial vote isn’t Hillary versus Trump … It’s Hillary versus Gary Johnson versus sitting on the couch on Election Day.”

So Clinton’s appeal to these voters needs to be multidimensional: She must reduce the antipathy toward her from young Sanders supporters and those whose knowledge of her is limited to media characterizations, while convincing them this is a close contest whose outcome will have a big impact on the world millennials will soon inherit.

It seems she made some headway on the first challenge.

“’She wasn’t the caricature her foes and the media had created of her,’Della Volpe says, summarizing what his interview subjects told him about their reactions to the debate. ‘I think in the eyes of millennials, she comported herself well in tone and substance. My sense was that they are beginning to take a fresh look at her.'”

Still, only 20 percent of Della Volpe’s focus-group participants said the debate made them more likely to vote for Clinton (10 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Trump). And it’s unclear how many of them were sufficiently horrified by Trump to develop the sense that voting against him is worth the effort. As I noted immediately after the debate, there’s even the perverse possibility that all the talk about Clinton “crushing” or “destroying” Trump at Hofstra could enhance the belief that she’s already won the election, making a “protest vote” for Johnson or Stein or nonparticipation a consequences-free action in the eyes of millennials who have meh feelings about Clinton.

Some targeted messaging to millennials stressing some of Trump’s more horrific positions — his climate-change denialism, for example, or his support for torture, or his casual attitude about nuclear weaponry — and hinting that he’s within reach of total power, might be advisable. And she does have an emergency fall-back option in the fight for millennial votes: coming out squarely for marijuana legalization.

She could also perhaps find ways to remind people that Gary Johnson’s Libertarians would be perfectly happy with privatizing not just prisons, but pretty much every government function short of raising an army. Indeed, some of Clinton’s allies are already on the job:

“NextGen Climate, the group run by liberal billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer, is on the ground in eight battleground states with a message that is almost exclusively aimed at reaching the millennial voters who are energized by the issue of climate change.

“Last week, the group threw six figures behind digital ads mocking Johnson as a climate change denier and warning millennials that climate change will cost them trillions of dollars.”

Beyond those messaging tweaks, it would be smart for Team Clinton to systematically tamp down the triumphalism as Election Day approaches, and instead create and sustain a sense of urgency, even anxiety. The contest is clearly turning into a mobilization battle, and anything the Clinton campaign can do to maintain a healthy fear of the opposition will make minor-party candidacies, or the couch, a less tempting option for millennials.

It’s been sometimes amusing and sometimes maddening to hear people say Hillary Clinton’s given Americans no idea of what she will try to do as president. But it does sometimes seem 2016 is not an election cycle that rewards wonkiness, as I discussed earlier this week at New York.

Veteran policy wonk Jonathan Cohn took a deeply informed look at what Clinton has done to lay out an agenda she would pursue as president, and found it to be comprehensive and progressive:

“Clinton’s policy operation has churned out more than 60 papers outlining plans for everything from housing for people with serious mental illness to adjusting the cap on loans from the Small Business Administration. The agenda includes extremely big items, like a promise to ensure no family pays more than 10 percent of income on child care, and extremely small ones, like investing in smartphone applications that would make it easier for military families living in remote locations to receive services available only on bases.

“Some of these ideas are more fleshed-out than others. The childcare plan, for example, is missing crucial details, like a price tag. And because the multitude of initiatives doesn’t cohere under a galvanizing theme, the whole of the agenda can seem like less than the sum of its many, many parts. Even so, Clinton’s plans are as unambiguously progressive as any from a Democratic nominee in modern history—and almost nobody seems to have noticed.
And that’s the rub: In a competition dominated first by Bernie Sanders’s plans for a “political revolution” and then by the broad and largely anti-intellectual thematics of Donald Trump’s campaign, Clinton’s characteristic wonkery has been overshadowed and then ignored.”

As Cohn indicates, some of the problem could be the forest-and-trees issue: The very heft and detail of Clinton’s policy offerings have undermined her ability to convey a broad and clear message. But the idea that she has nothing positive to say to complement her attacks on Trump is simply and almost laughably wrong.

Aside from the dynamics of the campaign, though, the other big question Cohn addresses is the relevance of Clinton’s policy agenda to the realities she will face if she is elected president. She will very likely face a Republican-controlled House (and possibly a Republican-controlled Senate) that will not be any more interested in helping her rack up accomplishments than they were when Barack Obama was reaching out to them in the name of an increasingly anachronistic bipartisanship. And to the extent she does try to work with Republicans, she and her administration will have to deal with a revived and vigilant progressive wing of the Democratic Party alert to any signs of a centrist sellout.

“The people in Clinton’s close orbit understand all this. They know that their boss has been preparing herself for this job for much of her adult life. They are confident that she will achieve progress in the White House by drawing on the qualities they admire about her the most: her belief in the potential of public policy to change lives, her tenacity. And they believe that advancing her agenda piece by hard-fought piece, laying the foundation for bigger legislation at some future point when the politics permit it, is a deeply meaningful accomplishment.”

“When the politics permit it” is a pretty important proviso for Clinton’s ability to win policy achievements. The intra-party tensions that represent one horn of the dilemma on which she might founder are actually growing less severe; one of the important phenomena Cohn explains is the recent movement of centrist economic thinkers toward positions once thought to be left-wing (misunderstood by conservatives and mainstream journalists as a purely political rather than intellectual development). But the vast gulf between the two parties has not shrunk at all, and a post-Trump GOP trying to rebuild itself is very likely to make total obstruction to a Clinton administration its unifying touchstone.

So, all in all, there is a tragic dimension to the story Jonathan Cohn tells: The wonkiest presidential campaign ever could find itself at sea in both this savage general election and in post-election Washington. But it has no choice but to move forward as though each policy paper or position statement matters as much as it should.

As the first presidential candidate debate of the general election grows nigh, what strategy should Hillary Clinton pursue? I offered my two cents earlier this week at New York:

[I]f what we have seen the last week is what we will get going into Monday’s first presidential debate, then logic would dictate a very aggressive Clinton strategy during the debate itself.

Clinton’s two fundamental problems are persistently high minor-party undecided votes that allow Trump to remain competitive despite low absolute numbers, and growing indications of a GOP turnout advantage attributable to greater enthusiasm. The simple solution to both problems is to use the debates to raise the stakes for the election by leaving no one under the illusion that a “protest vote” or a decision to stay home will have anything less than apocalyptic consequences.

With Clinton’s speech targeting millennial voters yesterday, it is becoming clear she understands that left-leaning voters who are contemplating a vote for Johnson or Stein — or who may just stay home — are as big a threat to her prospects as the stubborn Republicans who are manifestly not following #NeverTrump conservative elites out of the Trump column. Monday’s first debate offers a heaven-sent opportunity for her to make it clear there is indeed a lot more than a dime’s difference between the two major-party candidates, and that life will take a turn for the worse for each and every meh liberal voter if Trump becomes president. Fortunately for her, the same aggressive tactics that could wake up such voters might also light a fire beneath the “base” voters who seem inclined to mosey on down to the polls on November 8, while Trump’s angry legions snake-dance toward victory in a slow-motion white riot.

Conversely, you’d figure Trump would be perfectly happy with the current dynamics, and might well spend the debate burnishing his thin credentials for knowing something about actual issues and offering a respectable, if occasionally incendiary, option for a change in America’s direction. I would not be surprised if that’s where Trump-whisperer Kellyanne Conway is pushing his debate prep. But Trump can never be counted on to act logically if there is a viable alternative, so the debate could wind up being a true slug-fest. To the extent that Hillary Clinton cannot afford a bored and complacent electorate, that could be very good for her.

As Donald Trump began to climb in polls last week, there were reports of panic among GOP Beltway types. I explain the phenomenon at New York:

Non-Republicans may be forgiven for feeling confused by a report from BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins that many Republican insiders are privately freaked out by the renewed possibility that Donald Trump could actually be elected president. Wasn’t their horror toward Trump mostly a matter of fearing he’d be a disastrous loser who’d drag the whole ticket down with him? If he’s doing well enough to be a threat to win, won’t that make it infinitely easier to hang on to a Republican-controlled Congress?

These are good questions, but the truth is GOP-insider fear of Trump was never just about his 2016 general-election prospects. Some Never Trump conservatives sincerely fear the man on some of the same grounds many liberals feel. Others are worried about what Trump is doing to conservatism itself.

But there is an underexamined reason for a secret GOP desire to see the mogul lose in November: The immediate future of the Republican Party could actually be pretty rosy under a President Hillary Clinton. Unless the GOP loses the House along with the Senate, it should have the power to pretty much stymy anything the 45th president tries to do. If they hang on to the Senate, their obstructionist power might extend to Supreme Court and other appointments. Either way, 2018 would be set up as a boffo year for the “out party” up and down the ballot. The Senate landscape that year is already astoundingly positive for Republicans, and there’s no reason to think the GOP will immediately lose the midterm-turnout advantage that proved so useful in 2010 and 2014. Indeed, a President Trump is about the only thing that could screw up 2018 for Republicans.

A third straight Democratic term in the White House, moreover, would greatly improve Republican odds to finally break their presidential losing streak in 2020. That’s an even bigger deal than you might immediately imagine, since that’s the election year that will determine control of the state legislatures that will conduct congressional and state redistricting for the next decade. By contrast, a 2020 reelection campaign for President Trump would be a dicey affair, particularly since he’s pretty likely to draw a primary opponent.

And then, of course, there’s the big X factor for those Republicans who don’t care for Trump: If he loses, he could quite possibly be disposed of quickly as a factor in Republican politics. Yes, Republicans would have to figure out some way to keep the white ethno-nationalist passions he aroused at bay or better yet channeled in a more constructive direction. But there’s a good chance Republicans could treat the near disaster of 2016 as a cautionary tale and go back to fighting among “movement conservatives” and “reformocons” and pragmatists over control of the party, perhaps even finding ways to detoxify the party for Latino and millennial voters.

If Trump wins, of course, you can add to his prestige as the Republican who broke the Democrats’ grip on the White House the vast patronage powers of the executive branch and the even greater power of presidents to define their party in the public’s eye.

Yikes!