The conventional (media) wisdom continues to shift and solidify on New York Senator Hillary Clinton — that she’s continuing an adept and systematic campaign to foster ties with the political center:
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is cementing her ties to moderate voters, reaching out to centrists that some of her backers argue Clinton never really abandoned.
Clinton scheduled a high-profile speech Monday to the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that helped pave Bill Clinton’s path to the White House. The hundreds of activists gathered for the group’s annual meeting made her appearance its centerpiece.
“She has ‘it’,” said Ray Buckley, vice chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. “Some people don’t; some people do.”
Activists gathered for the meeting were talking tough on fighting terrorism, calling for a larger Army and new protections for children through a uniform media rating system.
(One of our favorite bloggers Bull Moose is there. You can read his take on the DLC meeting by CLICKING HERE.) Watching the DLC meeting with Hillary Clinton there is quite a fascinating experience. The last time the Democrats triumphed nationally as party and elected Bill Clinton they had a candidate who had consciously tried to assure wavering moderate GOP, independent and conservative voters that he held their values on some key issues on which Democrats were perceived as being weak.
That idea seems to have gone out of vogue after the two Bush victories and the GOP takeover of Congress, with some arguing that it’s time to carve out a sharply defined left (Democrat)/right (GOP) contrast. But DLCers argue that the problem wasn’t in the original Bill Clinton/DLC winning Democratic strategy but in the later losing presidential campaigns’ (Al Gore, John Kerry) execution…that did not clone the winning Clinton approach. MORE from the AP:
Clinton says she’s focused solely on winning another term in the Senate, but her every move is closely watched because polls show she’s the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
If you believe Hillary is not thinking of running for President then you believe the Illinois GOP will be drafting Alan Keyes to run for Senate again. AND:
Some have suggested Clinton has carefully tacked a course toward the political center as the speculation about 2008 grows. In January she used an appearance before abortion-rights advocates to call for “common ground” on the issue.
In addition, Clinton joined with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to push for health care legislation like a single system for medical billing that all insurers and providers would use to save time and money.
Clinton has also taken a tough stand against violence in video games and on television, and against illegal immigration. She sought out a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which allowed her to take high-profile trips to Iraq and put a foreign policy arrow in her quiver.
“It doesn’t surprise me that she’s becoming more moderate,” said Leroy Comrie, a city councilman in the New York borough of Queens. “I think the country is becoming more and more moderate, more and more conservative.”
But HC’s allies such as Al From, a key DLC founder and ally of both Hillary and her husband Bill, says she hasn’t changed at all. But that truly seems to be a BIT of a stretch, since the Hillary Clinton of the primary days and Clinton administration was notably more to the left than the Hillary In Office.
“She hasn’t done anything that’s changed what she’s done for 15 years,” said From, arguing that Clinton has always been every bit the moderate her husband was.
On abortion, “she’s always been for legal, safe and rare,” said From. “She was a strong supporter of welfare reform.”
In addition, From said, she pushed Arkansas into the lead in establishing charter schools while her husband was governor.
“She was the leading education reformer in the country,” said From. “She has been steadfast on national security.”
In From’s view, Clinton suffers from something of an identity crisis nationally. After her husband was elected president, she headed an effort to overhaul the nation’s health care, an unsuccessful move that opponents characterized as putting the country on a road to a government-controlled national health system.
For most voters, that failed health care effort was their introduction to her, said From, who sees her recent moves as simply moving the focus back to her traditional issues.
That could be true but it truly doesn’t somehow seem to compute with both the gut feeling most Americans had about where Hillary Clinton stood in her early years and by some of the things written at the time. She was widely perceived (if you go back and read some of the news pieces from the time or some of the books of that era) as one of the most progressive influences in the Clinton White House.
Which gets us back to the issue: who is to say it’s just wonderful to be The 24 Hour Conservative All Of The Time On Every Issue or The 24 Hour Liberal All Of The Time On Every Issue? The histories of American politicians do show that many of them can actually evolve in their thinking — that changes don’t necessarily always mean simply crass political positioning, particularly as they mature.
The issues for a Hillary Clinton candidacy will be (a) whether she is too polarizing a figure to ever be elected, (b)whether her campaigning style has evolved from her early days (too “hot” or too “cold” for the TV eye), (c)whether she can unify the party and (d)whether if she is indeed embracing high-profile centrist positions and fostering ties with the DLC the positions she embraces will be accepted as sincere by a potent number of voters to survive the onslaught she will face from the GOP and GOP infooutlets such as talk show hosts who do some of their shows from talking points.
Sincere? Insincere? No matter what, we are seeing a systematic move towards the political center. It’s a kind of slow political ballet. And perhaps its the GOP that should be on its toes.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.