There are many things we should remember about the events of late August and early September 2005, and the political fallout shouldn’t be near the top of the list. Still, the disaster in New Orleans did the Bush administration a great deal of damage — and conservatives have never stopped trying to take their revenge. Every time something has gone wrong on President Obama’s watch, critics have been quick to declare the event “Obama’s Katrina.” How many Katrinas has Mr. Obama had so far? By one count, 23.

Somehow, however, these putative Katrinas never end up having the political impact of the lethal debacle that unfolded a decade ago. Partly that’s because many of the alleged disasters weren’t disasters after all. For example, the teething problems of Healthcare.gov were embarrassing, but they were eventually resolved — without anyone dying in the process — and at this point Obamacare looks like a huge success.

Beyond that, Katrina was special in political terms because it revealed such a huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping America safe. He wasn’t. But as long as he was talking tough about terrorists, it was hard for the public to see what a lousy job he was doing. It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his bubble.

What we should have learned from Katrina, in other words, was that political poseurs with nothing much to offer besides bluster can nonetheless fool many people into believing that they’re strong leaders. And that’s a lesson we’re learning all over again as the 2016 presidential race unfolds.

You probably think I’m talking about Donald Trump, and I am. But he’s not the only one.

Consider, if you will, the case of Chris Christie. Not that long ago he was regarded as a strong contender for the presidency, in part because for a while his tough-guy act played so well with the people of New Jersey. But he has, in fact, been a terrible governor, who has presided over repeated credit downgrades, and who compromised New Jersey’s economic future by killing a much-needed rail tunnel project.

Now Mr. Christie looks pathetic — did you hear the one about his plan to track immigrants as if they were FedEx packages? But he hasn’t changed, he’s just come into focus.

Or consider Jeb Bush, once hailed on the right as “the best governor in America,” when in fact all he did was have the good luck to hold office during a huge housing bubble. Many people now seem baffled by Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with coherent policy proposals, or any good rationale for his campaign. What happened to Jeb the smart, effective leader? He never existed.

And there’s more. Remember when Scott Walker was the man to watch? Remember when Bobby Jindal was brilliant?

I know, now I’m supposed to be evenhanded, and point out equivalent figures on the Democratic side. But there really aren’t any; in modern America, cults of personality built around undeserving politicians seem to be a Republican thing.

True, some liberals were starry-eyed about Mr. Obama way back when, but the glitter faded fast, and what was left was a competent leader with some big achievements under his belt – most notably, an unprecedented drop in the number of Americans without health insurance. And Hillary Clinton is the subject of a sort of anti-cult of personality, whose most ordinary actions are portrayed as nefarious. (No, the email thing doesn’t rise to the level of a “scandal.”)

Which brings us back to Mr. Trump.

Both the Republican establishment and the punditocracy have been shocked by Mr. Trump’s continuing appeal to the party’s base. He’s a ludicrous figure, they complain. His policy proposals, such as they are, are unworkable, and anyway, don’t people realize the difference between actual leadership and being a star on reality TV?

But Mr. Trump isn’t alone in talking policy nonsense. Trying to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants would be a logistical and human rights nightmare, but might conceivably be possible; doubling America’s rate of economic growth, as Jeb Bush has promised he would, is a complete fantasy.

And while Mr. Trump doesn’t exude presidential dignity, he’s seeking the nomination of a party that once considered it a great idea to put George W. Bush in a flight suit and have him land on an aircraft carrier.

The point is that those predicting Mr. Trump’s imminent political demise are ignoring the lessons of recent history, which tell us that poseurs with a knack for public relations can con the public for a very long time. Someday The Donald will have his Katrina moment, when voters see him for who he really is. But don’t count on it happening any time soon.

Even seven years after the financial crisis, Wall Street has lost none of its ability to stir partisan rancor.

The Republican presidential candidates are almost entirely unified behind repealing the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation approved by a Democratic-controlled Congress after the 2008 collapse, which was brought on by reckless mortgage lending. That rollback would undoubtedly allow for more unfettered trading and lending.

Pushing in the opposition direction, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s two challengers for the Democratic nomination have made it a priority to bring back a Depression-era law that would force the biggest banks to break up.

Mrs. Clinton has joined the chorus of Democrats demanding more oversight of Wall Street, recognizing that the issue has become a rallying cry among progressive activists and is bound up in the broader debate on income and wealth inequality.

But Mrs. Clinton, who has won strong financial support from Wall Street in the past, has been piecing together a more unexpected set of policy proposals — including a change in the way capital gains, or profits on investments, are taxed. Her proposals so far strike a more moderate note than those of her fellow Democrats, but they also have a more realistic chance of becoming law if she is elected president.

“The things she is talking about are very different than what the left is talking about,” said Matt McDonald, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies who has worked on financial issues for the Republican candidates in the last two presidential elections. “The different ways that the candidates are approaching it are very interesting.”

The array of views emerging from the presidential primaries suggests that the financial industry — as well as investors and consumers — could face sharply different futures depending on which party ends up in the White House.

The most sweeping proposals have come from Mrs. Clinton’s two challengers for the Democratic nomination. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley kicked off his candidacy in May with a speech that pointed a finger at the “bullies of Wall Street” and followed up with an open letter to the “Wall Street megabanks,” which he labeled “too big to fail, too big to manage, and too big to jail.”

Mr. O’Malley’s primary policy proposal would bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, which was introduced as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and forced a separation between commercial and Wall Street banks. If that were re-enacted, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America, among others, would all have to be essentially cleaved in two.

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist, has made a similar call for the return of Glass-Steagall in his proposals for changing finance, which is at the top of his campaign’s list of issues.

Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley are taking advantage of the surge in enthusiasm that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has captured through her own criticism of the biggest banks, which hold an even larger portion of American assets than they did before the financial crisis.

While this has largely been an issue for the left, the populist appeal of the position across party lines was underscored when Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, also raised the prospect of separating the banks, along the lines of Glass-Steagall, in a speech he gave in late July as he tried to win more attention for his faltering candidacy.

Last month, at Mrs. Clinton’s first major speech on the economy, a heckler in the audience stood up and demanded to know if she, too, would push for a reimposition of the 1933 law. She did not answer the question at the time, but at a later event she said that the problems in the industry could not be solved by a single solution like a new version of Glass-Steagall.

This is tricky territory for Hillary Clinton. For one thing, Bill Clinton signed off on the 1999 law that essentially did away with Glass-Steagall — a change that some have blamed for encouraging the consolidation of the financial industry and ultimately the government bailouts of 2008.

Mrs. Clinton has acknowledged that the continuing power and influence of the financial industry is a major issue. In her first speech on the economy, she said that “ ‘too big to fail’ is still too big a problem.” But perhaps more significantly, Mrs. Clinton hired, as her campaign treasurer, Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive who developed a reputation for cracking down on Wall Street — and allying himself with Ms. Warren — during his time as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Last month, Mr. Gensler sent a fund-raising letter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters emphasizing her drive to “advance Wall Street reform,” and prosecute wrongdoing in the financial industry.

But it is not clear what specific measures she would pursue on that front. While the Obama administration has been light on prosecution for wrongdoing, it has already put in place regulations that have forced banks to cut back their trading activities and holdings of risky assets. Mrs. Clinton’s proposals recognize the change that has already occurred and do not appear to be intended to cause a big shake-up of the industry.

Her most concrete proposal introduced late last month would sharply increase the capital gains tax rate that investors pay on assets held for less than six years. A wealthy speculator who sells a stock after holding it for two years, for instance, would pay a 39.6 percent tax rate on any gains — the same top rate that is taxed on ordinary income. Currently, the top tax rate on capital gains held for more than a year is 20 percent, about half the rate on ordinary income.

Mrs. Clinton, who cultivated close ties with Wall Street when she was a senator from New York, said the policy was part of her broader effort to end the intense focus on short-term profits, which has been pressed on corporate America by big investors. In the same vein, Mrs. Clinton has advocated rules that would encourage companies to share profits with employees as well as investors.

William Gale, the co-director of the Tax Policy Center, said the tax change proposed by Mrs. Clinton would narrow a popular tax break and increase the amount of taxes paid by wealthy Americans. But in itself, the plan would not change much behavior on Wall Street.

Many of the most powerful investors are pensions and endowments that don’t pay capital gains taxes. For those that do pay taxes, Mr. Gale noted, the big and increasingly important private equity funds rarely engage in short-term trading, generally hold their investments for more than five years and would thus be unaffected by the proposed change.

Mrs. Clinton and her Democratic challengers have also argued for policy that would help check extremely short-term investors like high-frequency traders who rely on complex computer programs.

Mrs. Clinton, unlike Mr. Sanders and Mr. O’Malley, has not called for a tiny tax on all financial transactions — a levy commonly used in Europe, including London, that would be likely to limit high-speed trading. But she has left open the door to such a move. In a speech she gave in New York in late July, she said she would be introducing more proposals for “reining in excessive risk on Wall Street.”

Mrs. Clinton’s focus on so-called short-termism is unlikely to alienate most donors from the financial industry. Her policy suggestions pick up on proposals that have recently been made by overhaul-minded executives in the financial industry, including Warren E. Buffett and the chief executive of BlackRock, Laurence D. Fink, who have long bemoaned the fixation on quarterly financial results at the expense of long-term investment and growth.

Even Republican executives on Wall Street suggest that given Mrs. Clinton’s proposals so far, she is unlikely to turn into a foe of the industry. She is also avoiding some of the antagonistic rhetoric — like references to “fat cat bankers” — that won President Obama enemies in the industry.

“There’s an overarching sense among the senior people at the banks that she’s not going to be too harsh about us,” said a politically connected Republican executive at a large financial institution, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating other Republicans.

But industry analysts are alert for any shift in Mrs. Clinton’s tone, particularly given the changing flow of donations from the industry toward Republican candidates over the last six years. So far, Mrs. Clinton has raised slightly less money from the big banks than the Republican Jeb Bush and is more reliant on progressive-minded political action committees.

Mr. Bush, a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers and Barclays immediately before the financial crisis, is now seen as the favorite among Wall Street Republicans.

He has largely avoided talking about the financial industry, though he has criticized the Dodd-Frank law for allowing the largest banks to get even bigger. The Republicans Marco Rubio and Scott Walker have gone even further, calling for a full repeal of Dodd-Frank.

Still, none of the Republican candidates have shown any sign of wanting to ally themselves with Wall Street. Republicans like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Walker have explained their opposition to Dodd-Frank by pointing to the harm they claim it has done to smaller banks. But their position is likely to be popular among big banks as well, who have borne most of the costs of the new law.

While many working-class Republicans share a distrust of Wall Street, Mr. McDonald said that pro-business sentiment among most Republican voters would limit attacks on big banks during the primary. The same won’t be true on the Democratic side, however.

“This is the challenge for Hillary,” Mr. McDonald, the Republican adviser, said. “Her challenge and her limitation is her ability to come across on these issues where people want to hear a certain type of anger.”

by the Editor of The Amazing Democrats

The DNC are wrong to fall in line with the main stream media and begun an email campaign last week to its followers to defend Hillary’s private email server when she was the Secretary of State. You have to wonder who is hired as their Communications Director that is allowed to make such decisions.

Once again the DNC are digging themselves into a huge hole that they won’t be able to dig themselves out closer to the election and will end up hurting Hillary in the long term and not helping her win in 2016.

The Democrats and the DNC need to learn and learn fast to fight fire with fire. It is no secret that Sheldon Aldeson, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove and Dark Vader (Dick Cheney) himself were investigating Hillary over a year ago and the private server issue was brought to their attention as the investigators had to justified the large fees they were charging. Is the American public really that stupid that they can’t see through all this GOP bull?

The DNC could of easily months ago (before this story broke) quietly remind our main stream media that Dick Cheney when he was VP destroyed the VP’s residence’s guest list (which was illegal). It baffles me why the DNC can’t reach back to a few years ago when the last Republican administration in the U.S. was in fact George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Why is there is so much inaction of the DNC when this story was bubbling up for months before it even hit the main stream media outlets? Come on DNC wake up please or you will hand the 2016 Presidency to the Republicans and this will be twice in your history you kicked Hillary in the butt. I am amazed she is so forgiving of you when the Super Delegates (another crazy DNC rule) elected Obama as the candidate in 2008 even though Hillary was by far the more popular candidate for us all.

It is not a case of that is the past and move on. It simply is PC (Political Correctness) that has taken over in America. The words now used daily to quieten logically discussion has being set by the CEOs of Corporate America and the rest of us including the media follow like sheep. The word they invented was “inappropriate” and now that word is used for everything and everyday millions of times across the country to control the voices of dissent. Never do you heard them say that their own salaries or bonus are “inappropriate” or that Donald Trump is “inappropriate” in how he speaks about people’s race. No, because he is wealthy, he is not a no-body because he has that healthy bank account. Do you see where this is going DNC? It is like Shakespeare said in Hamlet: “was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. What we will be known as in this decade in the twenty-first century is a “bunch of hypocrites”. It can’t be helped with our obsession with PC and the word “inappropriate” that is mostly used to suppressive the voices of dissent while the very people imposing these rules are overpaid bloated useless CEOs that pour their company’s big bucks into the Super PACs RATs.

Hillary needs to take a leaf out of Obama’s 2008 campaign when he hired (somewhat) inexperienced people for all areas of his campaign. Hillary surrounding herself with all these “experts” from Bill’s past administration will be her downfall. Her communications department to date has proving useless with the email server story. What her people and the DNC are ignoring is that oiling this very wheel with the main stream media outlets are the Karl Roves, the Dick Cheneys, the Koch Brothers and Aldeson in Las Vegas and you fight fire with fire. What Hillary should do from September 2015 is hold a weekly hour long press conference every Friday morning and allow the reporters free rein with their questions and allow five minutes only (every week if need be) on the email server topic. She would even be advised to put her hands up and say “look I was wrong, it was stupid of me, and I did it for conveyance; that was all. No biggie here. Did I get a memo from the President to say he was writing me up for this? No.” The American public love that. You did something wrong, you were caught, say you’re sorry and by the summer of 2016 we will all be sick of Hillary’s emails and her private email server and please when she becomes President may she never send one email!

Listening to the learned attorneys on U.S. Federal law, when she was Secretary of State it was a very gray area then concerning using a private server for Federal government business and it is very unlikely the FBI could even find a law to proceed to move into a criminal investigation. Sadly for Hillary and the campaign the Roves, Cheneys, Kochs and Aldesons are feeding the main stream media differently and most not worth their grain in salt just publish this misinformation. Sound familiar? We had it for eight years under the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration and Obama left them off scot free. It’s called the “President’s Club” and there is nothing we the voter can do about that.

But the DNC emailing all their supporters last week trying to explain Hillary’s emails and her private email server when she was Secretary of State will do Hillary a huge disservice in the long term and plays right into the hands of Rove, Cheney, the Koch bothers and Aldeson. Please DNC fight fire with fire and let’s get Hillary elected in 2016.

An online defence of periods (time of the month) has been trending, after Donald Trump’s comments about “blood coming out of” Megyn Kelly, the host of last week’s Republican party leadership debate.

It all started with Trump’s response to Kelly’s challenge during Thursday’s debate. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” she said. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” came the reply.

When quizzed about the exchange afterwards, Trump made the remarks that were seized upon by his opponents. He told another journalist that he hadn’t been impressed with Kelly’s questioning or, as he saw it, her angry tone. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon.

Many thought he said this because Kelly is a woman – insinuating she was angry because she was on her period. He himself was swift to refute that interpretation, saying that he’d meant to say “nose” or “ears”, but plumped for “wherever” simply in an attempt to change the subject.

Either way, he’s now being targeted by women on Twitter who’re using the platform to live-tweet their periods, using the hashtag #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult and retweet it to Donald Duck Donkey Trump using the hashtag #realDonaldTrump

by Ian O’Doherty

One of the more frustrating aspects of discussing American politics with Irish people is that it gives them free rein to indulge in the laziest cliché of them all – the assumption that the average American voter is either stupid or dangerous, or both.

Nobody ever lost friends in this country by enjoying a good, old-fashioned and utterly cost-free sneer at the Yanks.

Indeed, the prevailing opinion, from the media down to the average bloke in the pub, is one which seems to believe that the most important country the world has ever seen is almost entirely populated by people called Bubba who care only about the Confederate flag and their constitutional right to shoot anyone who looks different to them.

It’s an easy, comforting way to look at the world. Just listen to the average Irish poseur and you will be confidently told that Bush was mentally retarded, Obama is a hero (really?) and Donald Trump is a deranged megalomaniac who should never be allowed anywhere near the White House.

But no matter how wearisome it may be to listen to people who think repeating a Jon Stewart quip passes for informed comment, when it comes to Trump, they are right – even if it may be for the wrong reasons.

Like anyone else who stayed up for last Thursday night’s Republican candidate debate on Fox News, I watched most of it through my fingers.

Sure, it was great fun, and nobody does political theatre quite like the American media, where such debates are treated as if they were the Super Bowl. But from the moment Trump made a typically nasty dig at Rosie O’Donnell, it became even more obvious that this was a man you wouldn’t put in charge of your local Community Watch programme, let alone grant access to the nuclear codes.

It’s been a tough station trying to defend the American electoral system in the last few weeks and Trump’s latest SNAFU, which saw him apparently imply that Fox’s Megyn Kelly was having her period after she quizzed him on Thursday night, is just another example of a man who should have been dumped from the race months ago.

Instead, he is now becoming ‘Teflon Don’, able to make ridiculous and pointlessly divisive remarks about Mexicans being rapists (made even worse by grudgingly admitting that “some of them are good people”); happy to imply that John McCain and, by extension, every other American POW was less of a soldier than those who weren’t captured, and now he can insinuate that any woman who gives him a hard time on the campaign stumps must obviously be having her time of the month.

It’s a horrifying example of the debasement of American politics, which has always had cranks and fruit cakes running for President, on both sides, but never has one gained so much traction.

Such a development is confusing and depressing in equal measure, but the chin strokers who express bafflement at his capacity to say stupid things and keep such a large lead in the polls are missing one crucial point: America is angry.

Obama will be remembered for what he represented rather than what he was – a rancorous and ineffectual President who seemed to feel a growing contempt for the country he led with such mediocrity.

Trump is the anti-Obama; brash where he is weak and utterly unconcerned about what the rest of the world thinks of America.

Unlike the current incumbent, the host of The Apprentice appeals to a vague, ill-defined fury which many American voters feel for the establishment.

As we have seen with the rise of militant left-wing TDs in Ireland, when people are scared and angry they will vote for a candidate who would never normally appeal to them. Protest votes often send the loudest message, but it is seldom the right one.

For all the talk about Trump being a racist, he is far from the most racially dangerous player on the pitch right now. No, that dubious accolade goes to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Portrayed by a craven and cowardly media as a spontaneous human rights response to the shooting of unarmed black men, they are actually a well-organised, well-funded bunch of race hucksters, an offshoot of the Black Panthers and Black Power movements who openly call for the murder of white cops and who insist that their white ‘allies’ walk separately from them when they march. Basically, think the KKK with cornrows.

They have so cowed the Democrats that even their white supporters, such as Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, have had speeches shut down by these racist fascists and you know things have all gone a little too weird when a politician feels compelled to apologise for pointing out that “all lives matter”, as O’Malley did.

On the face of it, the boorish, almost heroically obnoxious Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement have little in common, but they are both different sides of the same coin.

They appeal to the angry and pissed off in their community, and both are willing to lie, demonise, intimidate and use any means necessary to achieve their aims.

Also, and this is the real indictment, these totems of a divided nation are the direct result of Obama’s toxic legacy.

by Anne Gearan

After months of remaining largely above the partisan fray — and often appearing cautious to a fault — Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun taking more risks and landing some punches against Republicans.

The more aggressive posture comes as Clinton has suffered an erosion in her public image, with more potential voters saying they view her unfavorably than at any point since she entered the 2016 race and fewer people saying they find her trustworthy.

That trajectory and the drumbeat of news about Clinton’s unorthodox e-mail system when she was secretary of state have frayed some Democratic nerves and have fueled speculation that Vice President Biden may see a path to challenge the long- ­dominant candidate.

It also comes as her biggest rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is drawing crowds of 10,000 or more in the country’s most liberal bastions — underscoring Clinton’s enduring weakness within the party’s progressive base.

Clinton’s stepped-up tempo has included almost daily attacks on the better-known contenders among the wide Republican field, particularly billionaire front-runner Donald Trump and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

Clinton on the campaign trail

 “Republicans are systematically . . . trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting,” Clinton wrote in a Twitter message Thursday typical of her recent postings. “What part of democracy are they afraid of?”

The Clinton campaign also made a surprise release of her health and tax information late last month on the same day as a very public airing — in the home state of Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — of her policy reversal on U.S. relations with Cuba.

The Clinton team mounted a preemptive spin campaign ahead of last week’s maiden Republican debate and then invited reporters covering her to watch the two-hour debate at Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters.

“They’re all so out of touch, it’s hard to choose” a favorite among the 10 Republicans on the debate stage, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook joked partway through the event.

The week before, Clinton caught Bush off guard with a strong denunciation of his positions on Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and voting rights as he waited offstage to address the same civil rights forum. In the following days, she critiqued Trump, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Texas governor Rick Perry by name.

That elbows-out approach was out of character for the careful, no-false-moves operation Clinton has built as the Democratic front-runner. The strategy is aimed in part at answering one of Democratic activists’ regular complaints about Clinton: that despite posturing as a fighter, she has rarely taken the gloves off.

“It’s one thing to say it and another to really do it,” said Scott McLean, a professor of political science at Quinnipiac University, whose national poll is among those that have charted the erosion of Clinton approval levels that once appeared invincible.

Clinton has struggled to tamp down long-standing worries on the left that she is too close to powerful interests on Wall Street and in Hollywood. But her efforts now are also aimed at more moderate Democrats concerned that her early pace was too placid or regal.

She did little to dispel the image of privilege by spending the night of the Republican debates raising money in Hollywood and posing for a picture with reality television star Kim Kardashian.

Former House speaker and Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that Clinton is vulnerable and that the Democrats look like “a gerontocracy.”

Clinton is 67; Sanders and Biden are in their 70s.

The debate left him feeling good about the Republicans’ chances next year, Gingrich said.

“I’m pretty optimistic. We have a lot of work to do, but we’re moving in the right direction,” he said.

Although Clinton’s campaign leaders insist they are not running scared, her allies say the new injection of energy is partly an effort to counter negative coverage of her e-mail foibles and her falling poll numbers.

Her campaign says Clinton’s slide in popularity was inevitable as the well-known former secretary of state moved fully into the role of a presidential candidate.

“You’re going to get nicked up a bit” over a long campaign, chief strategist and pollster Joel Benenson told reporters Wednesday. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Clinton’s favorability rating shrank from 44 percent to 37 percent between June and July, according to an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released last week. Other surveys show similar drops and indicate her lead over Sanders has eroded.

Aides say attention to such numbers obscures the unfavorable ratings for Republicans and the fact that Clinton leads every Republican contender in national head-to-head matchups. A new WMUR-University of New Hampshire poll, however, puts Bush, Walker and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) one or two points ahead of Clinton in that state — a statistical tie that is bad news for her.

Clinton’s lead over Republicans nationally and over the rest of the Democratic field is a thin reed for a candidate with as long a résumé and as much time in the public eye as Clinton, McLean said.

“The only thing she’s got going for her is that Republicans are even more unfavorable and untrustworthy” in national polls, McLean said.

The launch of a $2 million advertising campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire last week was not an emergency response to a drop in support in those early voting states, Benenson said.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Benenson said during a telephone briefing that was itself an example of the campaign’s new posture. Anticipating a barrage of attacks on Clinton at Thursday’s GOP debate, the campaign had offered Benenson for preemptive spin. “These ads have been in the works,” he said. “There’s a story to be told.”

The gauzy biographical spots strike a very different chord than Clinton’s partisan jibes on the stump and her comebacks on Twitter. Republicans are not mentioned. The ads retrace themes of hard work and middle-class striving that Clinton struck when she entered the race in April and cast her as a champion for working people and families.

The campaign chose to run the ads now because it raised enough money to do so, another senior aide said. Clinton brought in more than $45 million between April and July. The campaign had set a threshold of about $35 million to begin ads, said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe aspects of campaign strategy.

“It’s true she is playing more offense,” said one campaign official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

The shift reflects a sense that the time is right to draw attention to what the Clinton team sees as Republican policy positions that are out of step with public opinion, the official said. Clinton has begun regularly criticizing her opponents on same-sex marriage, immigration, and access to abortion and reproductive health care.

“It’s just gearing up. It’s more active and more aggressive,” the official said, as the campaign begins to move past the phase of laying out Clinton’s policy positions one by one.

“This is an important time right now. They are getting a lot of attention, and we don’t see any evidence that the attention is helping them,” the official said of Republicans. “We see evidence the attention is hurting them and their brand. Trump has contributed to that.”

Clinton’s attacks will be limited to Republicans for now, the campaign official and other Clinton allies said.

The first Democratic debate is scheduled for October.

The audience for the tougher language is both Democratic primary voters and general-election voters, according to the campaign, although it is plain that reassuring politically active Democrats that Clinton will scrap with Republicans is a major motivation.

The campaign has been holding outreach meetings with select groups of supporters to discuss the attack strategy against Republicans.

“We want independent voters and general-election voters to mark these moments and have them seep into the public consciousness as much as you can do in August,” when the election is still more than a year away, the campaign official said.

“And we want to have Democratic voters see her doing this, see that she has prosecuted the case against Republicans very effectively.”

Karen Tumulty contributed to this report.