Hillary Clinton sets a record for campaign fundraising

Hillary Clinton plans to raise about $US2.5 billion to support her bid to become the first female US president. Picture: AFP

You have to love Hillary Clinton for her chutzpah and her iron-clad, ruthless determination to get the prize. In a campaign van named Scooby — yes, Scooby — she rode to her first electoral ­appearances in Iowa after announcing she will contest the 2016 presidential election.

There, she made three important commitments. The first, that she was going to “fix our dysfunctional political system and get ­unaccountable money out of it once and for all, even if it takes a constitutional amendment”.

At the same time, she plans to raise about $US2.5 billion ($3.2bn) — yes, that’s right, $US2.5bn — to support her bid to become president in what will be, by leagues, the most lavishly funded presidential campaign bid in US, or indeed planetary, history.

She is also a major beneficiary of the superbly opaque Clinton family foundation and charity that raises many, many millions of dollars, including from donations from numerous Middle Eastern governments, among them Al­geria, Morocco and ­others.

During the election campaign, though Clinton has withdrawn from the foundation’s board, it will continue to receive donations from selected foreign governments. Conflict of interest? That is for lesser mortals.

Her second big commitment was that she was going to do something about income inequality. It was obscene, she said, that chief executives sometimes earned 30 times the remuneration of the ­average worker. This comes from a woman who received a $14 million advance for a book and ­charges $300,000 for a speech.

And her third commitment was that this time, unlike eight years ago, she was going to be a grassroots campaigner. A champion of the poor, and of the middle class, she would be meeting regular folks and ordinary voters, in person, to seek their support.

There followed surely the most stilted, choreographed, perfectly filmed photo-ops with selected sympathisers, gathered in their ones and twos, and vastly outnumbered by camera crews, advancers, staff, spin doctors and occasionally selected journalists. Even some of the ordinary voters turned out to be Democrat staff members driven in by the Clinton campaign.

Clinton, who in person is certainly as charming as anyone you could hope to meet, has a great deal of trouble conveying that charm, and looking spontaneous and natural, on camera. She wore dark glasses to eat a burrito at an indoor restaurant and forgot to leave a tip. The photo-ops looked extraordinarily stilted.

Yet name recognition, campaign machinery and the best friend a politician can have — lots and lots of money — suggest she will be very hard to beat for the Democratic nomination.

Yet, for all that, there is nothing there really to condemn Clinton over.

She is a mainstream professional politician and the mistress of all the arts, the dark arts and the kindlier arts, of democracy as it is practised today.

Her likeliest Republican opponent is Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, the brother of George W. and the son of George Herbert Walker, both presidents themselves.

If there is a single family in America that can mobilise fund- raisers to match the Clintons, it is the Bushes.

So far, Clinton looks stronger than Bush. But looks can be ­deceptive. Clinton looked this strong at the same point in 2008 and she lost to a charismatic insurgent in Barack Obama.

Bush is relatively anaemic in his position as Republican frontrunner, but the Republicans almost always nominate their frontrunners.

Look back at the Republican presidential candidates since the 1970s. Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon — since 1972 every Republican nominee has been the frontrunner and establishment candidate.

You can make a strong argument that the 2012 Republican primaries, which were epic in their length, fierce in their endless televised debates, energy sapping and tending to emphasise disproportionately the role of party activists, helped render Romney an ­unelectable candidate, although Romney rallied in the debates and Obama’s ultimate victory was narrower than folklore would have it.

The Republicans have ­reformed their nomination ­process.

This presidential election will refine and develop all kinds of modern presidential election dynamics. Because Obama has been such an ineffective president, poor in relations with congress and an ineffective administrator, there is a swing back to the idea of electing a governor rather than a senator.

Governors and senators are the two classes of people most likely to become president.

The problem with senators is that they tend to be good at talking about issues but have no experience of running anything. It is surely no coincidence that US national security has never looked shakier and feebler than when it had three senators running it: Obama as President, John Kerry as Secretary of State and Chuck Hagel as ­secretary of defence.

Some senators have been good presidents, notably John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman.

A lot of presidents have previously been governors, recently Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Governors have experience running a government. This is experience that most closely resembles being president. The most successful postwar president, Reagan, was a two-term governor of California before he became president.

The Republicans have the ­majority of US governorships and they have some very capable and impressive governors — Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey, all of them presidential possibilities. Serving or recent governors tend to be pretty mainstream in their politics. They have to achieve compromises with their legislatures, run their bureaucracies, interact productively with the federal government, represent a whole state. But it’s quite a long time, nearly a decade, since Jeb Bush was a governor.

The other big factor in presidential elections today is identity politics. Obama played this with supreme brilliance in his campaign in 2008. It was genuinely historic for America to elect its first black president. It’s hard to imagine, frankly, this happening in Australia, Britain, Canada or any big western European country, or indeed any nation that proclaims its superior civic virtues. The nearest equivalent, perhaps, was the ­Indian prime ministership of the admirable Manmohan Singh, the first non-Hindu prime minister in an overwhelmingly Hindu nation.

Obama had an affluent if not privileged background, going to one of Hawaii’s finest schools and later Harvard University. Yet, by the most zeitgeist sensitive and perfect manipulation of the ­lamentations of identity, and the obsession with self, he managed to portray himself as a misunderstood victim.

Hillary Clinton just doesn’t have Obama’s skill in this kind of thing. But she will certainly play the first female president card for all it’s worth.

The smart thing for a Republican candidate, therefore, is to pick a woman, preferably a Hispanic woman, as his running mate. That is unless the candidate is already Hispanic, such as senator Marco Rubio or, like Jeb Bush, has a Hispanic wife, speaks fluent Spanish and has won Hispanic votes in large numbers before. For them the perfect running mate is probably a midwestern woman, preferably gay, who has served in the military and is some denomination of Christian, though even here an exotic religious affiliation — Zoroastrian perhaps — may help maintain media interest.

The basic electoral maths favour Clinton. More women vote than men, and more women vote Democrat. Hispanics have displaced blacks as the fastest growing minority. Since George W. Bush they have tended Democrat in presidential elections.

The Republicans have a lock on the south but have lost their lock on the Rocky Mountain states.

The Democrats have firmed up their lock on the Pacific coast and the northeast. The midwest remains the key battleground but some of the biggest midwest states, such as Illinois, have not voted for a Republican presidential candidate in a long while.

So maybe a midwest female governor who has served in the military and has a gay sister …

There will be countless calculations much weirder than that in this fabulous forthcoming festival of democracy.