The Successful Presidents Curse

We need Democratic leaders who can solve the Trump-related crises of their time, not the problems of decades past.

I joked to a friend recently that something like 76.2 percent of modern-day Democratic strategic thinking derives from Bill Clinton’s famous response to a town-hall questioner at a presidential debate in October 1992. The exchange is often short-handed as Clinton’s “I feel your pain” moment, and it really was a signal event in the history of American political culture.

You’ll notice if you watch or rewatch the clip below that Clinton never actually says “I feel your pain.” The common misattribution mistakes this strikingly empathetic moment on the eve of the election with a much angrier one months earlier in the same campaign.

If this is your first time seeing it, or your first time reflecting on it in many years, I think you’ll understand why it stuck in so many craws. You don’t need to have a high opinion of Clinton overall to acknowledge his retail skill.

By the same token, and with a bit of an open-mind, I think you can understand why it isn’t a template that can be easily copied. Clinton had a great common touch, and he captivated his audience that night in a spiel about kitchen-table issues. But you’ll also notice, there was no awkward pivot away from some other more salient line of inquiry.

The two key pieces of context are as follows:

• First, Clinton was the challenger, so attacking the incumbent economy by “feeling the pain” of regular Americans was smart—exactly what you’d expect an opposition leader to do. “Feeling the pain” of regular Americans during an incumbent campaign, as Democrats did throughout 2024, is, common touch or no, an admission of failure.

• Second, the state of the economy in 1992 was one where debt and deficits really were creating kitchen-table concerns. Clinton wasn’t ducking a question to pivot to kitchen-table issues. He was being responsive to the question. It really was The Economy, Stupid.

But because the people who provide professional-services to politicians tend to offer the safest possible advice, they’ve spent over 30 years instructing Democratic candidates and office holders to act like Bill Clinton in every circumstance. Donald Trump is shredding the Constitution? Well apparently the main problem with that is he’s not adequately focused on the price of eggs. Is the idea that if egg prices drop, his assault on the rule of law will be vindicated? For chrissakes I hope not.

LONG BARACK OFF A SHORT SHAPIRO

Clinton isn’t the only former president Democratic strategists like to point to, as if to say, “be more like him.”

Barack Obama isn’t defined by any one moment of brilliance or common touch. He was both an energetic, talented campaigner, and a highly disciplined speaker in unscripted moments. He was careful not to front-run public opinion too much, but could compensate for the perils of over-caution with soaring oratory.

You can’t tell the real Obama story without acknowledging that duality. But strategists and consultants go to war with the candidates they have, and whatever charisma god gave them. Advisers can only really control for policy ideas. Thus, Democratic consultants see it as an important lesson for today’s candidates that Obama opposed—or claimed to oppose—same-sex marriage until the polling on the issue flipped more than three years into his first term.

I don’t want to suggest there’s nothing to that observation. Being avant-garde isn’t always a loser in politics, but it does obligate a politician to work harder and be more persuasive. The problem with reducing the analysis to Obama’s position-taking lies less in the banal observation that it’s easier to sell policies that poll well than policies that poll poorly. It’s the way position-taking per se has driven so many Democratic Party actors into the uncanny valley.

For starters, it isn’t true that Obama was perfectly fastidious about taking poll-tested positions. If you’re going to place a ton of emphasis on Obama’s position taking, you should also examine the instances when he stuck his neck out, to better understand how he calculated whether and when to take stands on principle. It should not be the case that politicians lose their footing every time their views run afoul of public opinion.

But more importantly, it reduces Obama’s appeal in an unhelpful and inaccurate way. Obama wasn’t beloved for being careful with his words—to the contrary, one of the GOP’s favorite lines of attack against him was that he was too “professorial.” He didn’t draw huge crowds because he was a true institutionalist or small-c conservative who cared about norms. It’s because he was a cool, admirable guy. He was young and dynamic, he wrote about experimenting with drugs as a youth, he gave inspiring speeches all the time, and he had the nerve to run for president despite having a name that shared inconvenient resonances with both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

It turns out, policy platforms and poll surfing are easier to imitate than raw talent.

Fast forward a decade, and the party is overrun with Democrats who try to replicate Obama, with or without his rare charisma. The person who comes closest is Joshua Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, whose elocution and mannerisms are so redolent of Obama that I truly believe it will become a thing when he runs for president, and could spoil his ambition.

But most of Obama’s imitators don’t come close. In the years since he left office, Democrats have shed members with other kinds of charisma. Bernie Sanders has a principled passion that millions of people find appealing but he lost both of his presidential primary campaigns. Sherrod Brown is gone. John Edwards turned out to be a big phony, but today there are only a handful of southern Democratic populists in the entire party.

Speaking generally (because there are important exceptions) they’ve been replaced by figures of high-rectitude but little daring—former prosecutors or national security professionals or military veterans. Like Obama they’re careful with their words, but unlike Obama, they lack rizz, and unlike Bill Clinton, they lack common touch—they don’t feel your pain, they “feel your pain,” and everyone can tell it’s insincere, because it’s scripted. It’s meant to evoke Obamaism and Clintonism simultaneously, without actually being germane in context.

TRUMP UP THE VOLUME

Clinton and Obama weren’t just successful because they had rizz. They also offered answers to the questions of the day, instead of trying to evade them.