Romney treatment

Clinton gives Trump the Mitt Romney treatment

The attacks on Donald Trump have a familiar ring to them. 

By Gabriel Debenedetti

He’s too rich and out of touch to understand the problems facing average Americans. He’s hiding something in his tax returns. He’s a cold-blooded capitalist predator — and there’s a recording to prove it.

If the Hillary Clinton campaign’s attacks on Donald Trump feel a little familiar, it’s because they appear to be straight from Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney.

That push was successful, as Clinton’s allies are quick to point out. But it also runs the risk of being a little too conventional for a candidate as unconventional as Trump, leaving some former Obama operatives and Never Trump Republicans eager for reassurance that the Romney approach isn’t the only arrow in the quiver.

“Donald Trump is a pretty nontraditional candidate, but in a lot of ways we’re about to see a very traditional campaign, because it works,” said one former top Obama campaign official. “We beat the drum on Romney for months on jobs and his record, calling him out of touch with most Americans — for months — through paid media, candidate appearances, using surrogates.”

“I don’t think it’s a mistake,” he added. “But I don’t think we’ll know if it’s a mistake for months."

The Clinton campaign shies away from the parallel, understanding the urgency for rewriting the rules against Trump. They point out that the strategy is just one push in their multi-front assault on the real estate developer, one that also brands him as risky and xenophobic — something far worse than Romney.

But the opening shots of what figures to be a brutal general election campaign still have the unmistakable residue of 2012 — by design. It’s a crucial part of the effort to lay down an early definition of Clinton’s opponent — a goal that closely mirrors Obama’s 2012 attempt, his 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe told Clinton fundraisers at a private meeting in San Francisco two weeks ago.

“This is the exact way to do it, it’s just like Mitt Romney, except worse,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, a Clinton supporter who has campaigned with her in the crucial swing state and spoken out against a 2006 recording of Trump admitting he hoped for a housing market collapse in order to capitalize on it.

“I actually think there’s a great parallel between the comments about rooting for the housing market to collapse and the ‘47 percent’ comment. It’s right out of the horse’s mouth. It’s on tape and it’s going to get played over and over and over again. Just being back in Ohio today, and running around the district this morning, people are already talking about that, and that’s what you want. It’s one thing to take advantage of the collapse, it’s another to root for it.”

“It speaks to his worldview and his lack of knowledge about what average people go through while you’re a billionaire sitting in Trump Tower,” he added.

Romney’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, said one benefit of the message is that it might work to help bring Bernie Sanders’ supporters into the fold to support Clinton.

“Their first task is to unify the party, so I think they’re asking themselves what message works best to bring Bernie Sanders voters to them, and I think that probably they’ve done an analysis showing that it moves Sanders voters, because it’s something that Bernie Sanders could be seen saying," he explained.

Clinton’s campaign spent much of last week trying to inject the 2006 recording — and denunciations of it — into the mainstream conversation, aiming to demonstrate to voters that Trump was actively rooting against their interests.

The campaign made a major surrogate effort over conference calls and speeches and dialed into swing state media to talk about the housing crisis, which hit crucial purple-state targets Florida and Nevada especially hard.

They’ve also attempted to highlight Trump’s uncommon attachment to money as another sign of his distance from everyday Americans, on Thursday circulating a report about his latest controversial statement: “You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” (He was referring to the United States as a whole.)

To people in the Clinton political operation, the Trump recording — which was part of his Trump University program — is a clear echo of the recording secretly taken by a bartender at a 2012 Romney fundraiser, which was immediately used by Democrats to paint the GOP nominee as out of touch.

Kevin Madden, a senior adviser to Romney in 2008 and 2012, warned that what worked against a more traditional candidate like Romney might not be as damaging to a candidate like Trump who has already established a connection with many lower-income voters.

“What [the Clinton team] saw in the 2012 template was that this one [tactic] was successful then, and it can be successful now. But the thing they have to be careful about is not all Republican candidates are alike,” he said. “Every cycle is unique. Mitt Romney is much more vulnerable on the question of reliability of lower-income, working-class voters than Donald Trump."

The recording isn’t the only thing ripped from the 2012 playbook — there’s also the matter of Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. While some commentators have suggested that Trump is obscuring the records because he is not as wealthy as he claims, the Clinton campaign has focused on painting him as an unrelatable billionaire who is looking for special treatment — much like the Obama argument.

“Where I think the tax issue became a vulnerability was the Obama campaign tried to turn it into a character issue about trust and transparency. I think the initial hesitation [from Romney] on releasing them and drawing that issue out turned into an even greater vulnerability as a result,” said Madden. “They tried to make the 2012 central question: ‘Who’s on your side?’ And [our] being slow on releasing the tax returns was a way for them to use that to their advantage.”

Now, with Trump not just slow-walking his tax disclosure but altogether refusing to his release his returns, Clinton has taken to the trail to criticize the bilionaire’s unprecedented move. And in an echo of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s controversial 2012 assertion that Romney hadn’t paid taxes for 10 years, Clinton has been suggesting that perhaps Trump is refusing to disclose his tax returns because he hasn’t paid taxes.

“[Trump] needs to release his tax returns. The only two we have show that he hasn’t paid a penny in taxes,” she said on “Meet The Press” on May 22, before continuing the attack while campaigning in California during the past week. “It may be that he hasn’t paid — ever — any federal income tax. That’s why we want to see his tax returns.”

So far, the various political groups associated with Clinton’s bid have pursued a different line of attack against Trump. The main super PAC supporting Clinton, for example, has started airing ads in swing states that focus on Trump’s controversial statements about women in an attempt to play up his divisiveness.

There is no immediate indication that the group, Priorities USA Action, will necessarily run testimonial ads like the ones it created against Romney, starring individuals who were harmed by his businesses. But their future spots will make the case that he’s dangerous and a con man.

The campaign’s “strategy appears to be to throw the kitchen sink at Trump and force him to react. It certainly has an economic dimension — exploitation of workers, use of cheap foreign labor, nonpayment of taxes, etc. — aimed at challenging his claim to be a tribune of the middle class,” said David Axelrod, the architect of Obama’s campaigns, echoing the sentiment of a handful of other Obama alums who warned that the strategy would work only if it was one part of a much broader offensive.

“But it seems to me that the larger and more damaging attacks go to temperament. Do people want a guy this impulsive, reactive and volatile in the Oval Office, with life and death powers? By provoking him to react, the Clinton team is hoping to burnish that case.”