Republicans have lots of time to come up with a central theme with which they can attack Hillary Clinton, and right now there are a bunch of GOP pollsters scrolling through real estate listings for the lake houses they're going to buy with all the money they'll make from running polls and focus groups intended to figure it out. According to Eli Stokols of Politico, there's an early contender:
Forget about the Arkansas days, the small-bore scandals, her health care plan, and most everything else from the 1990s. A consensus is forming within the Republican Party that the plan of attack against Hillary Clinton should be of a more recent vintage, rooted in her accumulation of wealth and designed to frame her as removed from the concerns of average Americans.
With close to 20 announced and prospective GOP 2016 candidates, there's no singular, unified messaging effort yet. But interviews with GOP consultants, party officials and the largest conservative super PACs point to an emerging narrative of a wealthy, out-of-touch candidate who plays by her own set of rules and lives in a world of private planes, chauffeured vehicles and million-dollar homes.
The out-of-touch plutocrat template is a familiar one: Democrats used it to devastating effect against Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. While Hillary Clinton's residences in New York and Washington may not have car elevators, there's still a lengthy trail of paid speeches, tone-deaf statements about the family finances and questions about Clinton family foundation fundraising practices that will serve as cornerstones of the anti-Clinton messaging effort.
Yes, it's a "familiar template." But it's a familiar template Democrats use to attack Republicans. There have been plenty of wealthy Democratic presidential candidates before, but that attack isn't nearly as effective on them. It isn't that you can't convince voters that a rich president won't be sensitive to their concerns, because you can. But there has to be some plausible connection to policy for it to really work.
The policy content is what gives the personal argument a foundation. The personal explains the policy and makes it vivid. So for instance, Democrats argued that Mitt Romney's wealth showed why he wouldn't be on the side of ordinary people. In this case, Republicans are trying to argue that Hillary Clinton's wealth shows the same thing, but her response is going to be, well there are two candidates here, and one of them wants to cut taxes for the wealthy, opposes increasing the minimum wage, opposes mandating equal pay for women, opposes paid family leave, and opposes expanded overtime, and it ain't me.
In order to illustrate this, I took 60 seconds and made a table:
I used Bernie Sanders because he's probably running for president, but you could put any number of people there. And similarly, you could put lots of other Republicans, particularly Jeb Bush, in the upper left-hand corner. When you have a rich candidate advocating policies that benefit the rich, the personal details and the policy arguments complement and enhance one another. When there's a dissonance between the two, it isn't quite as compelling.
Which does mean that it would be somewhat harder for Democrats to make the argument against Marco Rubio than it was to make it against Romney (or it would be against Bush). They wouldn't have those amusing/horrifying stories and symbols to offer, like Romney's car elevator or the people he laid off. But what they'll still have going for them is that the idea that Republicans are the party of the rich is the default assumption voters start with. You don't have to do any work to explain that or convince them it's true. On the other hand, Republicans will have to do quite a bit of work to convince voters that Clinton is going to serve the wealthy and not ordinary people, for no other reason than the fact that she's a Democrat.
What Republicans can do, though, is enlist the news media to help them in their task. If they establish this now as one of their key arguments against her, reporters will be on the lookout for events and moments that reinforce it. What did she order at Chipotle? Are her culinary habits sufficiently down-market? Is that an expensive outfit she's wearing? Is she really "connecting" with reg'lar Americans?
After a few hundred stories asking these questions again and again, it might start to have an impact. But it won't be easy.
