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Joe Biden and Obama’s third term: Why it's hard for Hillary Clinton to
offer a change.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/02/joe_biden_and_obama_s_third_term_why_it_s_hard_for_hillary_clinton_to_offer.html

Why it’s so hard for Hillary Clinton to shake that charge.
[image: Vice President Joe Biden] Four more years?

Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Vice President Joe Biden spoke in Iowa on Thursday saying exactly what
you’d expect him to say about the success of the Obama administration and
how it should be carried on: “Those seeking to lead the nation should
protect and defend and run, yes run, on what we’ve done; own what we have
done. Stand for what we have done, acknowledge what we have done, and be
judged on what we have done. ... Some say that would amount to a third term
of the president. I call it sticking with what works and what we oughta do.”
[image: John Dickerson] John Dickerson
<http://www.slate.com/authors.john_dickerson.html>

A third Obama term. The vice president isn’t the only one who feels this
way. This, of course, is what Republicans have been saying Hillary
Clinton’s presidency would be for months
<http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/219277-gop-casts-hillary-clinton-as-third-term-for-barack-obama>.
Biden
didn’t introduce this idea, but it’s one thing for Republicans to say it,
it’s another thing for the vice president to bolt it onto the eventual
Democratic nominee.

When I heard it, I was fresh from having read David Axelrod’s book
*Believer* <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594205876/?tag=slatmaga-20>about his
life in politics from his first political rally at age 5 to the celebration
of Obama’s re-election in Chicago on election night in 2012. In the book,
he recounts the details of the 2008 campaign, when Obama repeatedly said he
didn’t want to give “John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s
third term.”
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This is a standard attack. Indeed, Democrats are raising money today
playing on the idea that Jeb Bush is a third George W. Bush term. The big
obvious difference in 2016 is that Obama is much more popular right now
than George Bush was at the end of his presidency. Bush’s approval rating
was 28 percent in the 2008 election night exit poll. Right now Barack
Obama’s approval rating is 47 percent in the Gallup poll, almost 20 points
higher. If the economy continues to improve, that number could climb higher
still and you could imagine Hillary Clinton saying, *If by third term you
mean another 59 months of continuous job growth and falling unemployment,
then yes I’ll be a third term.*

But what Axelrod’s book highlights is the way in which this kind of attack
presents challenges that go well beyond mere association. In the 2008
campaign, the Bush’s “third term” charge was a way to highlight the
contrast between the old and the new. McCain was a part of the Washington
system, Obama was from outside that system. The attack created an appetite
for the new, the flavor that Obama happened to be selling. Hillary Clinton
may be a strong candidate, but she will never be able to pull off new.

Axelrod writes about a crucial lesson he learned from working on so many
mayoral races. Voters want a “remedy, not [a] replica” in the next
candidate, even when the incumbent leaving office is well-liked. He says
this rule—which he learned most directly in the 1989 race for the mayor of
Cleveland where Michael White, the Democrat, followed the popular incumbent
Republican George Voinovich—applies to presidential campaigns, too. He
wrote to Sen. Obama in 2008: “When incumbents step down, voters rarely opt
for a replica of what they have, even when that outgoing leader is popular.
They almost always choose change over the status quo.” This is a different
formulation of what President Obama was talking about recently when he said
voters wanted “that new car smell.” Clinton is associated with the status
quo even more because she has the Obama years and the Clinton years
attached to her.

Given this view, simple distinctions between Obama and Clinton on policy or
positioning won’t be enough to break the third-term lock. It will be very
hard for Clinton to offer herself as a remedy because there is nothing that
makes her so constitutionally different from Obama that voters will
notice. She is probably, for example, a better deal-maker and would work
harder at connecting with Republicans, but that’s hardly a vast distinction
that makes voter sit up. Gender is an obvious distinction, but that’s not
the basis for a presidential platform.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Clinton is working so hard to come up
with a message that is so unique and powerful it looks new. Amy Chozick of
the *New York Times *reports
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/us/politics/economic-plan-is-a-quandary-for-hillary-clintons-campaign.html?_r=0>that
Clinton has consulted more than 200 experts in her effort to craft an
economic message. She’s not just trying to come up with a policy that
creates distance, but one that achieves escape velocity.

Were Clinton actually campaigning right now, she’d probably have had to
spend the day answering questions about where she stands relative to
President Obama. Is she a third term or not? Perhaps she would ace that
test, but this charge is also a trap to make Clinton bungle into the most
damaging caricature of her—that she is excessively political. If the public
doesn’t think there’s any big difference between what she’s offering and
what President Obama would offer in a third term, Clinton’s efforts will
look like Third Term Monte, a sleight of hand confidence game.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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