Rally against Trump

Obama and Clinton rally against Trump

The joint campaign event in Charlotte is a reminder that their alliance remains the Democratic Party’s defining partnership.

By Annie Karni

When Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama publicly reconciled eight years ago at a celebrated summer rally in Unity, New Hampshire, the two recent rivals were still closer to being opponents than friends.

While both candidates were set on healing the Democratic Party after a divisive primary, the lead-up to the event was fraught. Did their show of warmth — a kiss on the tarmac in Washington, D.C., as they boarded a chartered plane together — appear genuine? Would their praise for each other — “she rocks,” gushed Obama, seeking to win over her supporters — seem too forced?

When President Obama takes the stage at the Charlotte Convention Center with Clinton on Tuesday afternoon for their first joint rally of the 2016 campaign, it will be most notable for how far the two leaders of the Democratic Party have come in the eight intervening years.

“It is as far from fraught as can be,” said Obama’s former chief strategist, David Axelrod, of Obama's long-anticipated campaign trail debut. “He’s been chomping at the bit to get out there. There’s so many reasons why he feels strongly about this — part of it is his genuine respect for her, part of it is his feelings about the alternative. There’s no half-hearted warrior here.”

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton confidant, said of Tuesday’s rally that unlike eight years ago, “they have such a great relationship that there’s nothing to psychoanalyze. He wants to do everything he can for her.”

Coming just weeks before Clinton is expected to announce her running mate, the Charlotte rally will also serve as a reminder that the Clinton-Obama alliance remains the Democratic Party’s defining partnership no matter whom Clinton chooses as her No. 2. The idea of the first female president following the first African-American president bonds the two leaders in their own minds and in the minds of their supporters, aides said. Some Democratic operatives with young children like to joke that their kids could be 16 before they realize a white man can serve as commander in chief.

McAuliffe, who has been pushing his home state Sen. Tim Kaine as Clinton’s running mate, outlined what Clinton is looking for in a partner on the trail. “I’ve known Hillary for 30 years — she wants someone who can be a collaborator,” he told POLITICO. “President Clinton and Al Gore used to have their weekly lunches. That’s ingrained in Hillary’s head as well. She wants a partner, she doesn’t want someone who’s going to upstage her. You want someone helping to push your agenda.”

But so far, it's the outgoing president, with his 52 percent approval rating, who fits that bill.

The risk is Donald Trump and other Republican detractors will seize on the rally as further evidence that Clinton is running for Obama’s third term. And on the heels of last week’s energetic rally with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the two events could remind voters of how Clinton on her own remains a low-appeal candidate in need of star power to generate enthusiasm.

But Obama’s popularity among the Democratic voter blocs Clinton needs outweigh any potential drawbacks. On Tuesday, what will matter more than any close study of their body language, like eight years ago, is how the president posits his case for the woman he would like to see as his successor and safeguard of his legacy. Obama allies said they expect him to deliver a first-hand account of what kind of temperament the presidency requires. As a former rival who came around to Clinton, White House aides said, Obama can also make the most convincing case to voters who remain ambivalent about her. Clinton’s own willingness to serve under the rival she once viewed as an unqualified upstart also helps to cast her in a flattering light.

The image most ingrained in Axelrod’s mind of Clinton’s service in Obama’s Cabinet, for instance, is her reaction to the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act. “The day after it passed, she got up and she gave him a big hug,” he recalled, “she was hugging and high-fiving everyone in the Situation Room. She was so fundamentally excited that this had happened. It was a touching moment. What it said was there are bigger things than egos and ambitions.”

The rally Tuesday is also expected to represent a unique moment in the campaign: Obama and Clinton are not planning many joint appearances in the months to come. “They will be more apart than together,” said a White House official. “They can both draw crowds and energize and excite voters.”

The Charlotte rally also marks a break from modern presidential election history: It’s been more than half a century since a sitting president was called upon by a potential successor for help — and truly delivered.

With approval ratings in the 20s, George W. Bush was no asset to John McCain in 2008. And hot off Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 2000, “Clinton was a very mixed bag for Al Gore,” said Democratic strategist and former Gore adviser Robert Shrum. Gore kept his distance from Clinton, rarely even calling for the advice that the insulted outgoing president was desperate to give.

George H.W. Bush in 1988 needed to make a case beyond running as Ronald Reagan’s third term and needed some distance from the popular but aging president — Reagan’s best pitch for his vice president, at a rare joint rally in California, was that playing the role of standby equipment as a vice president was a role that didn’t “fit easily on such a man.”

In Richard Nixon’s 1960 race against John F. Kennedy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s assessment about his own vice president’s lack of experience — “If you give me a week I might think of one, I don’t remember,” he said, when asked to give an example of Nixon’s contribution to his administration — ended up in a negative ad run by the Kennedy campaign.

In contrast, Obama is the rare “unalloyed asset” for Clinton, said Shrum. “People who don’t like him are never going to vote for Hillary anyway,” he said. “There’s no downside at all. He mobilizes the base of the party; he’s got over 50 percent job approval. There’s no reason you wouldn’t use him as much as you can.”

“It’s a smart move for her, and it’s a smart move for the president,” said Roy Neel, a former adviser to Bill Clinton and Al Gore. “Obama can be extremely helpful to Hillary, certainly to rally African-American, Hispanic voters, and young people, the base that elected him in 2008.”

Originally planned for Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Clinton-Obama rally was rescheduled after the June 13 mass shooting in Orlando, and subsequently moved to the battleground state that Obama lost by a narrow margin in 2012 after having won it in 2008. The new location signals a Democratic effort to expand the map there in the wake of Trump’s recent weakness in North Carolina polls. Over the weekend, in a sign of the state’s increasing significance, Trump announced a competing rally in Raleigh the same day.

But this competing campaign stop might serve to fuel Obama’s case for Clinton.

“He can talk about what the presidency requires,” said Axelrod. “And the big argument she’s making is that she has the temperament and the experience that’s necessary for the job.”