Hillary Clinton evokes the past to sell a better economic future

Roosevelt Island, sitting in New York’s East River, was once where Manhattan sent its sick and its dead. On Saturday, next to a derelict smallpox hospital, Hillary Clinton’s second presidential campaign was formally brought to life after a two-month gestation.

At the first rally since announcing her 2016 candidacy in an online video in April, Clinton pitched a manifesto of populist policies to lift hard-working families left behind by the country’s economic recovery, in an attempt to bring a new era of a shared prosperity for all.

“I’m not running for some Americans but for all Americans,” she said in a speech that was largely an economic message. Standing in a park dedicated to Franklin D Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, she recalled his famous 1941 address, pointing to his goals of equal opportunity, the ending of special privilege for the few, and “a wider and constantly rising standard of living”.

“That still sounds good to me,” she said, in a speech that, like Roosevelt’s, sounded more like a State of the Union address. Evoking a 74-year-old agenda of progressive policies says as much about America’s long-term unsolved problems as it does about Clinton’s attempt to reinvent herself eight years after stumbling at her first presidential bid, for appearing entitled and lacking the common touch.

Combative

Clinton, at times combative, turned on the wealthiest Americans and billion-dollar corporations that played their part in making her and her husband extremely rich, paying them tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees since he left the White House 14 years ago.

“Prosperity can’t just be for CEOs and hedge fund managers; democracy can’t be just for billionaires and corporations,” she said. Addressing a crowd of about 5,500 supporters, she said that prosperity and democracy were important and that if you played your part and worked, you ought to get ahead.

“You brought our country back,” she said. “Now it’s time, your time, to secure the gains and move ahead. And you know what, America can’t succeed unless you succeed.”

Clinton’s newfound populism was well tested during the first two months of her campaign in low-key, stage-managed roundtable discussions in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the first states to nominate candidates.

Supporters see changes in policy from her 2008 campaign not as opportunism but a response to more progressive times. Stella O’Leary, a founder of Irish American Democrats, sees it as “a natural evolution” and pursuing policies that are now achievable.

“We wouldn’t have had much hope of getting some issues through pre-Obama – health, gay rights – and so she is taking it from where we have pushed it forward and taking it forward even further,” she said.

Others are not so sure. Outside Four Freedoms Park, Marnia Halasa, a progressive activist, wore a “dollar boa” to mock Clinton, caricaturing her as a figure “in love with money”.

Big business

“We are making fun of her ties to big business, the fact that she is kind of lying, that she is really not a populist; she is just saying that to get elected,” she said. Nearby, artist Elliot Crown performs with a cardboard pig, symbolising big corporations, and a Pinocchio nose.

The New York Times, analysing Clinton's campaign, reported last week that she planned to embrace liberal positions to mobilise the Democratic base, following Barack Obama's narrow path to the White House, rather than try to woo undecided voters with centrist policies, as her husband did. Some view it as a tactic to survive the primary election unscathed seeing off Democratic rivals, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, before shifting back towards the centre in the general election against the Republican.

“She wants to get through the primary as cleanly and efficiently as possible. One of the ways of doing that is to play to the party base,” said Ross Baker, professor of political science at Rutgers University.

Brian O’Dwyer, an Irish- American lawyer in New York and long-time Clinton supporter, said: “She has always said to me she doesn’t want to concede one single vote.”

Her speech on Saturday certainly cast her on the left flank of her party, although she did disown her past support of a free trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim countries that Democrats last week rejected in a humiliating snub to Obama.

Clinton addressed the historic nature of her bid – that she would be the first female US president – early and often in the speech. She also talked about the tricky issue of age, playfully dismissing concerns that, at 69, she would be the second oldest president if elected.

“I may not be the youngest candidate in this race,” she said, “but I will be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States, and the first grandmother as well.”

The latter reference reflects Clinton’s attempt to present a softer, more human side. On social media website Instagram last week, she posted photographs of herself as a toddler and young girl. On Saturday, she recalled her grandfather working in a lace mill for 50 years, her father scrimping so his small business could provide her family with a middle- class life and how her mother taught her “that everybody needs a chance and a champion”. She wished her mother could have lived to see Chelsea as a mother and to meet granddaughter Charlotte, she said.

Personas

Baker said: “I find it interesting that someone who has been in the public eye for so long has to have these reintroductions of herself. She has had so many personas – first lady, senator, secretary of state.

“Although she is a household name, she feels she has to present herself now as a mother and grandmother and that she has something in common with those suffering in the middle class.”

While trying to appear in touch, she bashed Republicans for being out of touch with “top-down economic policies that failed us before”.

"There may be some new voices in the Republican presidential choir, but they are singing the same thing – a song called Yesterday," she joked.

“These Republicans trip over themselves promising lower taxes and less regulations for wealthy corporations without any regard for what that will do to income inequality,” she said.

She lambasted them on their positions on immigration and women’s rights and lampooned them on climate change, which she described as “one of the defining threats of our time”.

“They’ll say: ‘I’m not a scientist,’ Well, then, why don’t they start listening to those who are?” she said.

By tying her message to Roosevelt, Clinton is, like the Republicans, harking back, while picking “four fights” for the future.

“She is looking back to look forward,” said Clinton supporter Pat Jacobson, who has lived on Roosevelt Island for 38 years. “She is picking up on Roosevelt’s campaign to carry it on to the future.”

“Because,” said Jacobsen, “we have seen it steadily eroded by successive Republican administrations.”