How an unbound Obama will help Hillary Clinton’s campaign
This is the era of Obama Unbound: The supposedly lame-duck president, with no more elections to run and little hope that much of substance can be accomplished through legislation, will say what he wants and do what he wants.
And it may turn out that this liberated Obama is exactly the one Hillary Clinton needs.
It’s against the law for there to be any official, explicit coordination of strategy and tactics between the White House and Clinton’s presidential campaign. But we’re probably going to see quite a bit of informal coordination, as the administration does things that just happen to benefit Clinton, and Clinton picks up cues from the administration.
For instance, Juliet Eilperin reports today that Secretary of Labor Tom Perez and White House adviser Valerie Jarrett are embarking on a tour called “Lead on Leave,” in which they’ll travel around the country holding events to promote laws at the local, state, and eventually federal level mandating that workers get paid leave for illnesses and family needs. Meanwhile, an Iowa politics blog reports that he got a call from a polling firm testing messages on family leave, and it sounded an awful lot like it came from somebody trying to get Hillary Clinton elected.
... So from where Hillary Clinton sits, they present a series of opportunities. The president can use the bully pulpit to bring attention to an issue like family leave, then Clinton can incorporate it into her campaign, and Republicans get forced to talk about an issue they’d rather ignore. (We’ve already seen this dynamic play out a bit on climate change.) This shows that it’s way too simplistic to assess whether Obama is an asset or a drag on Clinton just by looking at what his approval rating is today compared to last week.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/03/25/how-an-unbound-obama-will-help-hillary-clintons-campaign/