Hillary Clinton, Outsider?

AT THE RISK of inflaming the very same argument that I tried to kill in yesterday's thread (using the best weapon I know how -- children's television), I have to point out that Hillary Clinton has shown a new and surprising strength in online fundraising, if not to the extent that Obama has. Matt Stoller gives an intriguing take on why (emphasis mine):

What happened now, though, is that the Clinton campaign just tapped out of its McAuliffe big dollar donors, and Clinton was forced to rely on her real base - the women who love her. (I question the "women" bit, but it's not key to the argument --Markus) And unwittingly, with her showing in the Super Tuesday states and her $5 million donation to her own campaign, she asked them for support in a way she never had. And they responded.

It's remarkable, because it is converting voters and supporters into activists and donors, only it's probably not the creative class anymore. Clinton, like Dean, became an underdog, a real underdog, with more public support than Village support, and her public directly responded over the internet to close this gap.

In other words, the Obama campaign has had a strategy of cultivating online donors and activists, they know how to do it, and they are very good at it. The Clinton campaign has not done any of this particularly well because it hasn't been their strategy. And somehow, they are at rough parity over the last 48 hours.

Well, shit. This race has just completely scrambled the insider-outsider dynamic, hasn't it? We all thought that Hillary Clinton was the consummate moneyed insider, and Barack Obama the upstart people-powered outsider. Whether this was ever true is arguable -- but it's certainly not anymore.

Obama's establishment support at this point is on par with Hillary's; all kinds of party apparatchiks have lined up behind him, bringing donors along for the ride. You cannot credibly call him an outsider anymore, just like you cannot credibly call him the underdog. Meanwhile Hillary -- whose campaign tried very hard, stupidly, to paint her as the inevitable Übercandidate -- is now forced by pure financial necessity into more of an outsider role.

It's not an unnatural fit for her, believe it or not; the Clintons' arrival in Washington predates memory for most of us, but the fact is they were (and are) viewed with a definite elitist skepticism by many of the Village doyennes. They and their people were seen as a bunch of Arkansas good ol' boys, hicks who talked funny and hung out in some very unfashionable parts of Washington; it was an affront to many of the older D.C. socialites (Democratic and Republican). Consequently the Clinton administration had a lot of trouble gaining traction (both in the media and legislatively). Think of the way David Broder, king of Old Washington, famously said it in 1998:

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

Bill and Hillary Clinton were always awkward heads of the establishment, and I think they'd both be much more comfortable running from outside it -- much like, we are beginning to see, their supporters. The question ss whether her campaign is capable, institutionally, of making such a switch. (Certainly Mark Penn is not the man to do it, that worthless union-busting choadbag -- if this once-inevitable candidate actually winds up losing, it will be almost completely his fault -- but other folks in the Clinton organization show more promise.) It's quite possible that they're not, or that the circumstances will dictate a different course, or that the idea will just be too utterly ridiculous to stick.

But if Hillary really can recast herself as the outsider candidate, expect to see a subsequent popular (and populist) Clinton surge -- one that will give both the old-line media who've hated her from the beginning, AND the elite bloggers who are convinced of her pervasive establishmentarianism, a new and altogether confusing kind of heartburn...