Subject: Washington Post story
From: Brent Budowsky <[email-masked]>
To: John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Roy Spence <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2015 11:12:17 -0400

As I expected it took 24 hours for the Post to pick up the story, and say HRC has
surrogates to "her dirty work" (the Post's phrase) and attack Bernie, quoting the
same suspects.  It would have been much better for the story to had a sentence
that when she heard about it Hillary told her campaign to tell all surrogates to be
preach her cause and not attack Bernie.....

Here is the key point, and you know I have been warning about this for months: Hillary
is not running against Bernie, she is running against herself, against the perception
that she is calculating and lacks principles and causes and a higher purpose to be
president and that she is too beholden to inside powers that give her money and
an insider system that voters detest in this election, in both parties.....

Attacking Bernie doesn't help her win this campaign against herself, it hurts her,
stories about others doing "her dirty work" only dirty her and lower her level of trust,
and the attacks against Bernie only help him, making him look like the fighter against a
corrupt politics of which Hillary appears to part of.....

The Obama consultants who are now Hillary consultants will never understand this,
in fact much of the Bernie support from the grassroots is a reaction against what
they see as Obama and Democrats in Washington letting them down....Bernie is
fighting an asymmetrical political war from the bottom up, Hillary is fighting an
old fashioned conventional war from the top down in a political year when the top
is terribly disliked and the bottom is in revolt....

The way for Hillary to win the political war is not for her or her surrogates to do 
anything that is "dirty work", it is for her and all of her surrogates to champion a
positive vision of her and her presidency, to make her a champion for those on
the bottom to lift the bottom up, not to look like a defender or even worse the
leader of the top fighting to keep their birthright to have power....

Praising Bernie and even more praising those who support Bernie for idealistic
reasons and seizing as many leading progressive issues as possible is how she
wins the campaign against herself to win the campaign against Bernie....attacking
Bernie helps Bernie and hurts her....it is vital to understand the dynamics of the
anti-insider sentiment dominating this campaign which hurts Hillary and Jeb for
exactly the same reasons and to understand the asymmetrical politics of outsiders
against insiders fueled by social media that has far more power this year than what
Chuck Todd says on Meet the Press.....

My difference with the campaign's approach is not tactical, is it ideological and
strategic and I rarely say this but my warnings over the last 6 months have been
proven 100% right.....

She should support bringing back some version of Glass Steagall because it is right, because ending Glass Steagall was Bill's worst mistake in an otherwise highly successful presidency that I have lavishly praised, and because Hillary is almost universally seen as far too entrenched with Wall Street players who paid her money
to speak and give money to her campaigns.....ask Jeb Bush how much his money
has lifted his support....and if she won't do it, she has to compensate twice as hard
elsewhere.....

Joe Biden can sound like Elizabeth Warren on Labor Day, but he won't take one
vote from Bernie if he runs because it's a little late in the game for him to discover
this, Hillary won't win one vote by attacking "robber barons" unless she backs it up with substance which doesn't mean talking class warfare, but does mean taking some
policy positions that do not require approval from Wall Street donors....

I don't worry about the latest polls, polls can change if candidates do the right thing,
but I worry like hell that I was at a university day with thousands of students on
Saturday where Bernie had a booth with a long line of people signing up to support
him, and Hillary did not have any booth and I did not see even one Hillary button or t-shirt from even one student who cared to support the candidate who would be the
first woman president----not even one!!!

And on Bernie's major issues, whether they are "left" or not, most of them are
majority positions, and she would defeat Bernie by co-opting as many of these
issues as possible and not using "surrogates" to do "dirty work" against him which
helps him, and hurts her......Brent

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