Bush and Clinton ramping up off the trail

By  Matt Viser. The Boston Globe

The two best-known contenders in the 2016 presidential nominating contest are leveraging their political pedigrees, meeting privately with wealthy campaign donors, and working to build a sense of inevitability about their respective party nominations.

The missing ingredient? Contact with average voters.

For Republican Jeb Bush, that is beginning to change, as he does some on-the-ground politicking in Iowa on Saturday. Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet scheduled face-to-face, campaign-style meetings with average people.

Both are rusty, when it comes to direct campaigning. Their names have not been on ballots in years. So even as they lay the groundwork for expected bids for the White House, they have avoided voters, with virtually no contact with the citizens of the early caucus and primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

While it may make them seem walled off from the public, it helps them avoid unscripted moments of the sort that can reshape a campaign — like when Clinton cried in the final days before the 2008 New Hampshire primary or when Mitt Romney’s habit of guessing the ages of young children in 2012 reinforced his awkward image.

Bush, the former Florida governor, is planning to drop by barbecue and pizza restaurants in Iowa, and next Friday he is planning to attend a house party in New Hampshire. In Las Vegas earlier this week, he met with 400 senior citizens.

The New Hampshire swing will be his first trip to the state since he campaigned for his brother George W. Bush in 2000.

“It’s critical,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman who is hosting the Bush party at his home in Dover, N.H. “No amount of money can make up for a candidate’s inability to sell him or herself in small group settings.

“A candidate who just can’t connect with people and doesn’t have at least a pretty good retail touch just isn’t going to succeed.”

Bush, a two-term governor, last appeared on the Florida ballot in 2002. Florida is a diverse and sprawling state where campaigns are run more like national races, with heavy emphasis on raising money and running television ads. Intimate personal interactions that are vital in Iowa and New Hampshire are less common in his home state.

During Bush’s campaigns, he would take long bus tours across Florida. Those who have spoken with him recently say that he has talked about the lessons he learned from a 1994 loss in Florida, where he displayed his knowledge of policy papers but struggled to connect with voters.

“It’s not like he’s been out of the gym for 10 years and go back and every muscle hurts when you get back on the treadmill,” said Ana Navarro, a Florida-based Republican who has long been close with Bush. “He’s not been active at the pace of a candidate, but he’s been a highly sought-after campaign surrogate.”

Navarro said Bush could actually benefit from being out of office for nearly 10 years.

“He’s been a private citizen, schlepping around on commercial flights, going through TSA, and doing his own grocery shopping,” she said.

But the former Florida governor may struggle in other ways: He and several members of his family recently went on the paleolithic diet, which entails eating like a prehistoric human and emphasizes meat and vegetables.

“The pancake breakfasts are going to be a challenge for him,’’ Navarro said. “And I’m not sure those Iowa state fair corn dogs are on his paleo diet.”

As Bush transitions into more grass-roots politics, he may need to heed the lessons that his family learned the hard way.

In 2000, George W. Bush lost the New Hampshire primary to John McCain, who held numerous town hall meetings and rode around on his bus, the “Straight Talk Express.”

“George W. Bush came into the campaign . . . with big crowds from the get-go and not a lot of retail,” Cullen said. “Eventually that came to be a problem for them. The perception was they didn’t need to do that stuff, and that perception got filtered down to regular voters. People started to think: He wasn’t working for it.”

That trap awaits Clinton this time around in the early Democratic contests.

The former secretary of state, US senator from New York, and first lady is already well known and has no prominent primary challenger yet, giving her little reason to dip into the early voting states. But she runs the risk of appearing to be inside a protective bubble.

She has continued to speak at high-paying engagements, charging as much as $300,000 and, as the Washington Post has reported, requiring one of her hosts to provide room-temperature water with lemon wedges on stage, as well as hummus, crudites, and diet ginger ale backstage.

This weekend, she is scheduled to speak to students in Miami at an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, which is a part of the nonprofit Clinton Foundation. It was not billed as a political event.

The latest controversy around her exclusive use of personal e-mail while serving as secretary of state — which is being reviewed by the Department of State to see if it violated rules — could add to a perception that she wishes to avoid public scrutiny.

Her only response to the e-mail controversy so far is a 26-word tweet requesting that State Department officials release the e-mails that she turned over to them. If she were out in public in uncontrolled settings, she might be pressured to answer questions from voters and the public.

Lou D’Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator who has long been close with Clinton and urged her to do more retail events in 2008, said her continued appearance on the lecture circuit may have a more lasting impact, image-wise, than the e-mail flap.

“I honestly think they should have stopped the paid speeches,” D’Allesandro said. “They should have stopped that early.”

During her 2000 run for US Senate in New York, she was an aggressive retail politician. She’d stop into diners unannounced and talk to voters, and she crisscrossed the state on a “listening tour.”

The last time Clinton faced voters was during the 2008 Democratic nominating contest, when she was upset by Barack Obama. Early in the race, she had regained her footing by winning New Hampshire after an embarrassing loss in Iowa. But Secret Service protection, a battalion of reporters following her, and events that drew hundreds of supporters often made it difficult to appear in the kind of intimate settings that politically inclined voters in these early primary states cherish.

This time, Democratic activists are hoping she make a more concerted effort to not take anything for granted and meet voters in small settings.

“Given her high profile, that’s the formula — to once again cast aside the mantle of first lady, US senator, secretary of state, and become humble,” said George Bruno, former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman.

“That’s tough to do, particularly when you’re used to having people sit down and write your talking points, manage your schedule, open the car door for you, tell you what to do.”