We’ve seen that before. It was 1992, and doubts about Bill Clinton’s integrity, stoked by his marital infidelities and avoidance of the Vietnam War, were the biggest threat to his presidential campaign.
Stanley Greenberg, a top Democratic campaign strategist, devised a secret plan to turn around the candidate’s reputation for dishonesty, reports Nytimes.
In the latest episode of The Run-Up, we talked to Mr. Greenberg about how Mr. Clinton pulled it off, and what lessons it holds for his wife, Hillary, whose image problems as a truth-shader today are even greater than her husband’s were in the 1990s, surveys show.
As of the latest New York Times poll, 67 percent of registered voters have doubts about her trustworthiness.
We speak with Lissa Muscatine, a longtime adviser and speechwriter for Mrs. Clinton, about how those closest to the Democratic nominee have tried to combat this image — and about the deep-seated habits and instincts that can unintentionally hurt Mrs. Clinton as she tries to escape it.
And we talk to Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The Times, about the high-profile episodes, from Benghazi, Libya, to a private email server, which have contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s troubles. Did she mislead the public in these cases or not?
Few people are better positioned to know than Mr. Landler, who wrote a book about her time as secretary of state called ‘Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power.’
‘Why wasn’t she willing to have a government email account like every other employee of the state department?’ Mr. Landler asked on The Run-Up. ‘That goes to the broader issue around the Clintons: that they simply don’t view themselves as being subject to the same regulations that the rest of the world has to comply with.’