The unusual chumminess of Clinton and Obama
In their first public campaign stop together, President Obama and Hillary Clinton visit the purple state of North Carolina Monday. Mr. Obama has a mixed record in North Carolina, which went for him the first time he ran in 2008 and then denied him a victory in 2012, when he lost to Mitt Romney by 90,000 votes. If Hillary Clinton is offering a third Obama term, 2016 will be the rubber match.
The last time the relationship between candidate and incumbent was this close was in 1988 when Ronald Reagan stumped for his vice president, George H.W. Bush. Given how tricky that association was, the Clinton-Obama tandem may be the least fraught alliance between incumbent and campaigner in presidential history.
Usually, presidential candidates are not this chummy with the incumbent president of the same party. It's a little like the relationship between a teenager and a parent. The child must rely on the parent for certain things only a parent can provide, but the teen resents the dependency. (Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall is the title of a great parenting book that captures this phenomenon.)
In 1960, President Eisenhower, known for his hidden-hand style of leadership inadvertently gave Nixon the Heisman when asked about his number two. He hadn't meant to. In fact, he'd been insisting to reporters at a news conference that Nixon had been involved in shaping policy. But then when he was asked to name an idea that had originated with Nixon, Eisenhower said "If you give me a week, I might think of one." Kennedy used the line in a campaign ad to undermine Nixon's repeated claim that he had more experience than Kennedy.
In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey desperately tried to run out from under Lyndon Johnson and his unpopular Vietnam policies. Humphrey only saw his numbers really improve when he finally broke with the president on the war.
In 2000, Al Gore avoided Bill Clinton so much that according to Taylor Branch's book The Clinton Tapes Clinton complained to Gore after the race that he was disappointed that he wasn't used more. Gore was angry Clinton hadn't apologized to him about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he blamed Clinton for his loss to George Bush.
Candidates want to stand on their own two feet to give voters a unique figure to get excited about. Association with the old boss makes that harder because people think you're just a weak imitation of the guy they used to like. After seven years in Clinton's shadow, Gore famously fought to show that he was an Alpha Dog, paying feminist Naomi Wolf $15,000 a month to give him advice on how he could appear more assertive (she reportedly told him, among other things, to wear more earth tones).
Vice President George H.W. Bush kept trying to convince Reagan's aides to put him at the center of administration events so that he could burnish his own public image but grew frustrated when they didn't. "It's almost as if I don't exist," Bush wrote in his diary, according to Jon Meacham's Destiny and Power.
Bush also had to navigate around the Iran-Contra Affair in which he was implicated. Still, Reagan's approval rating was near 60 percent at the end of his term and the duo was the only one since FDR to win three consecutive terms for the same party.
In 2008, John McCain didn't want to be near George W. Bush in his campaign. "I understood he had to establish his independence," Bush wrote. "I thought it looked defensive for John to distance himself from me. I was confident I could have helped him make his case. But the decision was his. I was disappointed I couldn't do more to help him."
Vice presidents or administration officials who try to distance themselves from the presidents they served are engaged in a totally bootless pursuit. (You can roll your eyes at your parents but you can't pretend you don't share the same genes.) Voters don't buy it, which makes efforts to wriggle out from the reality of things look disingenuous. It also creates an ongoing tension that can fill any news cycle as aides fight a shadow war in the press.
This connection between campaigns and incumbents is even stronger in the modern world of polarization, where little gets done through the legislature. Presidents rely on executive action more, which means the nominee of a party is ever more tied to the incumbent whose work they always promise not to undo. Their opponents, on the other hand, can make easy promises to shred all executive actions on the first day.
How helpful can Barack Obama be to Hillary Clinton? His approval rating is near 50 percent now, and it has been climbing to heights not seen since his re-election bid. Some political scientists argue that the approval rating of the incumbent is a possible predictor of electoral success.
The president will use his current experience in the Situation Room to attest to Clinton's readiness for the job. When Mr. Obama endorsed her several weeks ago, he put her at center stage in the bin Laden raid when citing her qualifications.
The president has particular strength in the African American community. In 2012, when appealing to black voters, he asked them to have his back. Now he'll ask them to do it against the man who led the effort to suggest he was not a legitimate president because of his Kenyan birth.
North Carolina has the largest African American population of any of the traditionally competitive states, at 22 percent, slightly higher than Virginia, which has a 20 percent black population and where we will also likely see President Obama campaign. North Carolina also has a large share of suburban female voters and college-educated voters, two groups the Clinton team hopes to target against Trump.
President Obama once said he understood that voters needed to have that "new car smell," which some took as a dig at Hillary Clinton. There's no more of that now. He's all in. It's the best way he can protect his legacy. Plus, he also really dislikes Donald Trump.
