Budowsky: Clinton needs a Kennedy moment

Instead of walking down the steps of Air Force One in North Carolina acting like an incumbent politician by winning President Obama’s third term or acting like a human prop in an opposition research ad attacking Donald Trump at a staged event in Atlantic City, Hillary Clinton should throw her consultants out of the room, close the door and watch the YouTube video of Robert Kennedy’s speech at the Cleveland City Club shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

It is no secret that Clinton has a trust problem. Nor is it a secret that, among far too many voters, she has a likability problem. And it is common knowledge documented by reams of data — though not respected by Team Clinton — that there are deep feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and anger throughout a land in which two-thirds of voters believe America is on the wrong track and do not want a continuation of the status quo that Clinton appears determined to promise.

{mosads}There is an ominous overconfidence in the Clinton camp. They celebrate polls that show her leading Trump by numbers that are dangerously close to the margin of error, when she should be ahead by double digits after his season of ghoulish gaffes. Team Clinton reminds me of the British establishment figures who believed the Brexit vote would lose before they discovered that polls underestimated support for leaving by 4 to 10 percent — a result that could easily occur here in November.

Listen to Trump carefully. Ignore for today that much of what he says are grandiose promises based on lies. He promises to create more jobs than voters can imagine. He promises to destroy terrorists with a wave of his hand. He promises to do unimaginably great things for veterans and to be the greatest president Hispanics ever had.

When voters are hurting, pained, angry and anxious about their future, they desperately want to believe that some of it is true. When Clinton merely campaigns as the qualified candidate of the establishment and fails to offer a powerful and uplifting vision of change as the alternative to Trump, she violates the defining truth about the 2016 election.

On the night Dr. King was assassinated, it was Robert Kennedy who broke the indescribably sad news to a mostly black audience. In the following hours, he addressed a mostly white audience of business and civic leaders at the City Club in remarks titled, “On the Mindless Menace of Violence.”

Kennedy, who appealed to white working class voters as well as blacks and Hispanics, spoke of mindless violence that hurts white and black, rich and poor, young and old, the famous and the unknown. He spoke of hatred and guns and the swagger and bluster of those who foment the violence of racial division in an America in danger of becoming a nation of strangers.

But Kennedy went even further and talked of a danger as deadly as the shot in the dark or the bomb in the night: the violence of institutions that breed indifference, inaction and decay. This violence plagues the hungry without food, schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. It leads us to share a city but not a community, divided against one another in ways that deny and destroy our common interests.

It is the corruption and failure of many institutions today, and the establishment that runs them, that is the source of support for the British exit and Donald Trump and the vast public discontent and anger that exists today. Kennedy spoke about it then; Clinton should speak about it now, to men and women of all races and incomes. She needs a passion and conviction more potent than mere attacks against Trump or 10-point programs drafted by team advisers, accompanied by platitudes about how great things are going in a country where two-thirds of voters want to see change.

Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He can be read on The Hill’s Contributors blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.