WASHINGTON — When Hillary Clinton reaches the point in her campaign rallies where she rattles off the things she promises to do in Washington, the list grows very long, very quickly.
If she reaches the White House, that list will need to get much shorter in a hurry. For Clinton, as with every president, the window for transformational policies will almost certainly be small. Political capital from an election gets spent fast, and even the Clinton campaign concedes Democrats are unlikely to win full control of Congress, meaning some compromises with Republicans likely would constrain the agenda of a Clinton White House.
Clinton will need to choose among the priorities she has talked about at rallies like the ones she conducted last week in Denver and Las Vegas: The biggest investment in infrastructure since World War II, immigration reform, debt-free college, equal pay for women, expanded rights for labor unions, an overhaul of the nation’s multibillion-dollar electricity grid, new gun safety laws.
On the Democratic Party’s left, in particular, progressives find themselves jockeying for position in these final months of the presidential race. Research has shown that the promises given the most attention at this point of the campaign are the ones candidates are most likely to pursue after the election.
The groups are cajoling, confronting and corralling the Clinton campaign and potential sympathizers in Congress to move their crusades to the top of her 100-day agenda.
“There is finite time, and there are only so many things a brand new administration can accomplish,” said Lisa Gilbert, who helps lead the campaign finance reform effort at Public Citizen.
Activists are using every tool at their disposal, and for those in Gilbert’s coalition, that included the recent Netroots Nation conference of progressives, where Clinton promised to push a constitutional amendment restricting money in politics within a month of taking office.
But the folks fighting to get money out of politics are competing with backers of some other heady plans on Clinton’s plate. Most of the issues, like campaign finance reform, have been policy quagmires for years.
Clinton is vowing to secure a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants in this country illegally, to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, to expand Obamacare, to sweeten benefits under Social Security, and to take more steps to slow climate change. Most of those ideas have been on President Barack Obama’s agenda, too, but have fallen victim to the same opposition forces Clinton would face.
Asked recently what the Democratic nominee would pursue immediately, the first thing her campaign chairman, John Podesta, mentioned was the path to citizenship — among the heaviest of policy lifts.
A sophisticated, multimillion-dollar campaign has been working behind the scenes for months to keep the immigration issue at the top of Clinton’s agenda and to prepare lawmakers to move fast should Clinton assume the presidency.
For all the positioning, the biggest impact activists may have is to influence who shows up to vote. Advocates are lobbying their supporters to turn out in the hope they can credibly claim a significant hand in an eventual victory.
Neera Tanden, who was Clinton’s policy adviser in 2008, says that if the Democratic nominee wins, her agenda could be shaped in large part by how Republican lawmakers perceive her victory. Tanden expects those lawmakers would take a hard look at which voting groups abandoned the GOP and seek compromises with Clinton that could help lure those voters back.
“Have they lost because of the Latino vote?” she said at an Atlantic magazine panel during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. “Have they lost because of the women’s vote? Have they lost because they went on the far-right crazy on foreign policy? Or for some other reason? That is what they will, for some very short period of time, think of fixing.”
Sometimes, happenstance, rather than organized action, forces a candidate’s hand. A gaffe by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally, forced her campaign to declare in unequivocal language last month that the massive Pacific trade deal Obama is pursuing would be quickly abandoned in a Clinton administration.
McAuliffe had told a reporter that Clinton’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, was just lip service. Progressives were enraged, and the campaign disavowed McAuliffe in language that eliminated any wiggle room Clinton had left herself.
As Clinton keeps making promises, the one promise her campaign acknowledges she can’t make is that she will fulfill all of them.
Podesta reflected on how quickly Republican opposition hardened against Obama’s agenda of hope and change after he took office on Jan. 20, 2008. “The honeymoon for Barack Obama,” Podesta said — “it didn’t get through January 20.”