aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, July 30, 2005

She’s no left-winger

Much as I dislike Weisberg’s reasoning for why Hillary can’t win in ‘08, I do like his take on Hillary the left-winger:

One facile argument, often voiced by Hillary-loathers on the right, is that she’s too far to the left. The “real” Hillary is closer to Howard Dean than Bill Clinton, a recent piece in the National Review asserted. Wrong! An unhedged supporter of the war in Iraq, Sen. Clinton stands at the hawkish, interventionist extreme of her party on foreign policy. Despite her pandering vote against CAFTA [Jacob, that was a gratuitous swipe! her argument reads well to me], she’s a confirmed free-trader and deficit hawk. On the cultural issues that often undermine Democrats, she seeks common ground, sometimes with flat-earth conservatives like Rick Santorum, and has been nattering about the “tragedy” of abortion. Even Hillary’s notorious government takeover of health care was misconstrued as an ultra-lib stance. In opting for a mixed, private-public managed-competition plan, the then-first lady was repudiating the single-payer model long favored by paleo-liberals. Her plan was flawed in many ways, but it wasn’t what Ted Kennedy wanted.

In fact, Sen. Clinton’s political positioning couldn’t be better for 2008. Despite being a shrewdly triangulating centrist on the model of her husband, she remains wildly popular with the party’s liberal core: It seems to share the right’s erroneous view of her as a closet lefty and draws closer to her with every inane conservative attack. There’s no other possible candidate in either party so well poised to claim the center without losing the base.

My favoirte moderate(s) may well agree. Earlier in the week David Schraub pointed to this Debate Link post noting that “she should be applauded for some gutsy moves.” Later he wrote:

I think Clinton’s move is more one of perception than content--she’s now focusing on her more centrist positions (like a hawkish defense policy and social moderation) rather than the liberal ones. I’ve seen no evidence that she’s changed the material substance of these positions--much less that it was done for the sake of pure politics… nowhere in this is there any proof that Clinton is changing from any previously held position.

To be clear, I do think Hillary is a liberal. My kind of liberal. A winning liberal.