Denis Staunton: Hillary Clinton on track to be president despite email scandal

This week's Republican presidential debate saw Donald Trump stumble as his rivals found their voice at last, offering the party's establishment hope that the real-estate mogul's domination of their contest may soon be over.

If Trump's lead does crumble, it could come too late for a number of mainstream candidates as they run out of money. Still, many Republicans are consoling themselves with the US media's daily diet of stories about the apparently grievous difficulties facing the Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. If they are hoping for an imminent implosion of her campaign, however, they are likely to be disappointed.

Clinton's poll numbers have been in freefall for two months and veteran socialist senator Bernie Sanders has pulled ahead of her in some polls in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Official investigations into her use of a private email server as secretary of state will ensure that the story will remain in the news into next year, despite her belated semi-apology this month. When a poll from Quinnipiac University recently asked voters to describe Clinton in one word, the most common choice was "liar", followed by "dishonest" and "untrustworthy".

Meanwhile, vice-president Joe Biden, still grieving over the death of his son Beau from a brain tumour earlier this year, is very publicly agonising over whether he should enter the Democratic race. A candid, moving interview with talkshow host Stephen Colbert further boosted Biden's image as a straight-talking, unspun politician with a personal story voters could relate to. Unlike Clinton, according to the media consensus, Biden possesses the most highly prized quality in this election season: "authenticity".

More human

During the 2008 campaign, when Clinton was being urged to show a more human side, Democratic pollster

Mark Penn

famously remarked that “being human is overrated”. So, too, is “authenticity”.

Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama not because she was insufficiently human or authentic, but because she ran a poor campaign against a superior candidate and was out of tune with her party's base on the key issue of the Iraq war.

The authentic Clinton is a careful policy wonk who believes in the power of technocratic solutions to social and economic problems but is uncomfortable with emotional and rhetorical displays. This Clinton was on eloquent display in an encounter last month with young activists from Black Lives Matter, the campaign for racial justice that grew up following recent police killings of black men.

When one of the activists suggested that Clinton should try to change “white hearts”, she replied: “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to change every heart . . . You can keep the movement going, which you have started, and through it you may actually change some hearts. But if that’s all that happens, we’ll be back here in 10 years having the same conversation.”

Close to the centre

During this campaign, Clinton has positioned herself close to the centre of Democratic opinion, unveiling detailed policies on issues such as the cost of university tuition, childcare and access to addiction treatment. Sanders, who has proved to be a more formidable candidate than the Clinton team expected, excites part of the Democratic base, notably young, white, educated voters. But his image is probably too radical to win majority support in the party.

As for Biden, he was a disastrous candidate in 1988 and 2008, and his record as a senator from Delaware places him far to the right of his party. A foreign-policy hawk who backed the Iraq war with gusto, he bragged until recently about his role in passing some of the toughest measures in the "war on drugs", which have incarcerated huge numbers of young black men and helped to destroy urban communities.

Delaware is home to many US banks and credit-card companies and they had no better friend in the Senate than Biden, whose biggest single campaign contributor over two decades was the credit-card company MBNA.

It is character, rather than “authenticity”, that matters in US presidential elections and Clinton’s toughness and her willingness to fight, which she showed in the final weeks of her 2008 campaign, will help to carry her through to the Democratic nomination.

In the general election, the Democratic candidate will enjoy important demographic advantages, as well as the fruits of Obama’s relatively benign economic legacy. By November next year, many voters will still view Clinton as untrustworthy, but that may not be an impossible impediment to her election. After all, two of the most electorally successful presidents of recent decades were also among the most slippery: Richard “Tricky Dicky” Nixon and her very own Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton.