STORY HIGHLIGHTS
(CNN) -- If there were an obvious takeaway for the 2016 hopefuls this year, it might as well have been the motto for the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton: "It's the economy, stupid."
So it is no wonder that many of Hillary Clinton's touchstones on the campaign trail this year have come straight from her husband's 1992 playbook at times almost verbatim a focus on rebuilding the middle class, addressing income inequality, and reviving the American promise that each generation should fare better than the last.
The echoes of the early 1990s in Clinton's speeches as she weighs a run for the presidency are no accident. In what amounted to her first major foray on the campaign trail in September at retiring Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin's steak fry, she spoke of restoring "the basic bargain of America" -- one her husband had proposed in the 1992 campaign -- that "no matter who you are or where you come from, if you work hard and you play by the rules, you deserve the opportunity, the same opportunity as anyone else, to build a good life for yourself and your family."
Flash back to Bill Clinton's speech in struggling Johnstown, Pa., in April of 1992. The American dream that he grew up with, Clinton said in a typical line from his stump speech, had been shattered for millions of Americans. "The idea," he said, "that if you worked hard and played by the rules you'd be rewarded, you'd do a little better next year than you do last year, and your kids will do better than you that idea has been devastated."
If she runs for president, pundits will invariably argue for the next two years over whether a Hillary Clinton White House would look more like a third term of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton and Democrats face a difficult challenge holding on to the White House given that it often flips to the opposing party after eight years of one-party control.
But when it comes to voter frustration and unease, Hillary Clinton may be on strikingly similar terrain to what she and her husband navigated in 1991 and 1992.
"You just look at the statistics now and they really do match up with 1992," said Chris Lehane, a White House adviser to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Given that the Clintons left the White House in the midst of an economic boom with unemployment at about 4%, Lehane argues that there are only upsides for the former Secretary of State in associating herself with her husband's tenure.
"She benefits enormously from connecting herself to that time period, but it also requires putting out a vision that matches with today's challenges," Lehane said. "It really gets down to the basic idea of what needs to be in place in this day and age so that if you're a middle class family, your kids are actually going to have the opportunity to do better than you."
READ: 7 things Hillary says at almost every speech
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Can you hear the Clinton echo?