David Shribman
Another week, another restart.
This time, Donald J. Trump is restarting his presidential campaign with a fresh focus on the Islamic State. Monday afternoon, he set out his vision for battling the insurgent group, vowing "we will defeat radical Islamic terrorism" and saying the rise of ISIS was "the direct result" of the policies of President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In truth, Mr. Trump has had more starts than a Formula One race at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Quebec. In the primary season – after losing the Iowa caucuses, for example, and then again after Wisconsin – Mr. Trump recovered with aplomb and ease. Now that he's the Republican nominee and is in a general election campaign, that process has become considerably more difficult.
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That difficulty coincides with a subtle, thoroughly unexpected, change in the character of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Suddenly, quietly, but unmistakably, the contest has been transformed into a choice far different from the one for which political analysts – and top campaign strategists of both parties – expected, planned … and mobilized: a choice between what a third Obama term would look like versus what a first Trump term would look like.
In the process, Campaign 2016 no longer is a referendum on one of the best-known political figures ever to run for president, Ms. Clinton – a former First Lady, twice-elected senator from an important state and four-year secretary of state – but a candidate facing ethical questions, including her use of a private e-mail server.
Now the campaign is a referendum on Mr. Trump, a political newcomer who unexpectedly swept to victory in GOP primaries and caucuses.
Such readjustments are rare in American politics but not unprecedented. Television debates transformed the 1960 campaign from a referendum on a third term of Dwight D. Eisenhower – steered by the steady, experienced hand of Richard M. Nixon, a House member, senator and, for eight years, a high-profile vice-president – into one about the vision and idealistic appeal of a far less experienced Massachusetts lawmaker, Senator John F. Kennedy.
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Mr. Nixon also was at the centre of a second such campaign transformation, eight years later. The 1968 campaign began as one that started out as a referendum on him, an unsuccessful candidate for governor of California, then a loyal Republican soldier in the doomed 1964 campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and finally a prominent Republican surrogate in the 1966 midterm congressional elections. By late August, it had transformed into a referendum on the troubled Democratic Party, roiled at a raucous Chicago nominating convention that was tainted by riots outside the hall and rebellion inside.
In this campaign, in 2016, the Republicans set out to tie Ms. Clinton to Mr. Obama, a questionable strategy, perhaps, given his resilient poll ratings but one that surely appealed to GOP primary and caucus participants, who were frustrated by his seven years in office. It also drew on the difficulty of a party retaining the White House after two terms in the presidency – a challenge that neither Hubert H. Humphrey (1968) nor Albert Gore Jr. (2000) could meet.
Nearly two years ago, Republican strategists distributed a memo to candidates and media personalities friendly to the GOP arguing that "Hillary Clinton has a Barack Obama problem." The theme of the memo – "10 Reasons Why Clinton 2016 = Obama's Third Term," was the leitmotif of much of the early Republican primary campaign.
Both Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida often tied the two together. Monday, in his remarks in Youngstown, Ohio, on the Islamic State, Mr. Trump made the connection explicit, describing Mr. Obama as an "incompetent president." But, to his disappointment, Mr. Trump admits that media focus has been turned to his own campaign – its strategy, its missteps, its challenges.
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On Sunday, he said in frustration, "I'm not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton. I'm running against the crooked media!" A day later, he tweeted about the "disgusting and corrupt media." Ms. Clinton has adopted the classic tactic sometimes, and probably mistakenly, attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: not to interfere with an opponent destroying himself.
That has troubled some Democrats, who favour mounting an aggressive assault on the Republican nominee; a television advertisement underwritten by an independent group, not the Clinton campaign, is being aired in Pennsylvania, considered a critical battleground, and asserts bluntly that Mr. Trump is "unfit to be president."
Other Democrats, troubled that the focus is on the troubles of the Republican nominee and not the proposals of the Democratic nominee, worry that if the character of the campaign shifts and Mr. Trump recovers, they will have surrendered an important opportunity to define Ms. Clinton on the issues.
Some of that concern rests with how Ms. Clinton's plan for free college tuition at public institutions of higher education has receded into the background.
The candidate adopted that proposal as a counterweight to an even more dramatic proposal offered by Senator Bernie Sanders, her rival for the party's nomination. This issue was one of the principal reasons young voters flocked to the Vermonter, at 74 an unlikely magnet for that demographic group, which includes as many as 75 million Americans.
"If you look at younger people, Trump is a disaster for Republicans," says John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California. "Some of it is that his demeanour is off-putting, but most of it is the air of intolerance about him." How much of a difference could those voters make?
The new USAToday/Rock the Vote Poll, released Monday, shows that millennials favour Ms. Clinton by a margin of nearly three to one, giving Mr. Trump by far the weakest level of support among that age group in modern history. A new start by Mr. Trump must include an appeal to that group, among many others.