Brand Hillary (Page 4)

What accounts for her success? Partly it can be chalked up to the fact that Hillary Clinton turned out to be a really, really good politician. Yet one could also argue that her success flows from the unique brand of politics that she has been practicing. To describe her approach as "triangulating" or "moving right" misses the point. For all the consternation on the left about Clinton, her approach depends less than her husband's did on using the left as a foil. Instead it relies on two fundamental ingredients: She projects pragmatism on economic issues, and she signals ideological flexibility on social issues. This latter tactic is not, as is often argued, about appeasing the cultural right. It's about appealing to moderates in both parties.

Take the Santorum press conference. You can endlessly debate whether popular entertainment hurts kids, or whether government should fix the problem. Yet if there's one thing most middle-of-the-road parents can agree on, it's that they are worried about how pop culture affects their children. By appearing with a right-wing Republican loathed by liberal Dems, she's essentially telling moderate Republicans, "parenting should transcend ideology, so this Democrat will stand with anyone if it might help kids." Yes, it legitimizes Santorum. But it also helps to defuse an undeniably potent right-wing strategy: the effort to paint Dems as antifamily.

Or take the abortion speech. You could argue that while it might have been discomfiting to prochoice groups, it's actually a smart tactical response to the right's increasingly successful strategy of painting prochoicers as ideological extremists. Polls consistently show that majorities favor legalized abortion. But decades of conservative attacks have fooled voters into believing that prochoice groups are to the left of public opinion. The speech wasn't really about abortion policy; it was about what to do before conception to reduce pregnancies, and while Clinton stressed teen abstinence, her main focus was on encouraging birth control, a stance objectionable only to the hard right.

The political beauty of this, as NewDonkey.com's Ed Kilgore has observed, is that it makes a subtle play for Republican moderates by forcing right-wing ideologues to reveal themselves as the true extremists, as foes of the common-sense goal of lowering rates of unwanted pregnancies. "When Democrats speak this way about abortion," says one senior Hillary adviser, "it drives a wedge between sensible Republicans, who want to reduce the amount of abortions, and the right-wing crazies, whose main goal is to stop people from having sex."

Her approach on economic issues is, at bottom, quite similar. By all accounts, Clinton has devoted a great deal of energy to dealing with the sluggish upstate economy. But here again it's worth noting the political subtleties of her approach. Her solutions tend to be less about correcting inequalities of wealth or class and more about finding ways that government can make the economy work better for everyone, CEOs and low-level employees alike. This difference is most visible in healthcare. Whereas her 1993 plan called for massive government intervention and pitted employee against employer, today she is careful to talk about the nation's disastrously screwed-up healthcare system as one that's afflicting not just the uninsured but also large employers paying huge premiums. As she likes telling upstate audiences, "GM has become a healthcare company that makes cars." It's not surprising, then, that her onetime nemesis, Newt Gingrich, suddenly finds himself in sympathy with her ideas on healthcare issues.

To the extent that her pragmatic economic approach in turn provides cover for progressive advances, Hillary has torn a page from the Book of Bill. President Clinton recognized that if you could persuade voters that you weren't ideologically rigid, that you were merely interested in government that works, you could get Republican moderates to listen--and getting them to listen is the key--to a Democrat talk about federal spending and fiscal responsibility. The paradox is that the tactic allowed Clinton a freer hand to pursue incremental liberal policy gains. As Joe Klein details in The Natural, President Clinton may have sold out on welfare reform and NAFTA, but those decisions gave him elbow room to expand spending on lower-profile liberal programs, from Head Start to Americorps.

To be sure, such advances did little to allay the disappointment many progressives felt when Bill Clinton lurched to the center on economic issues after winning office in 1992 on an aggressively populist platform. Hillary, too, has in some ways followed a similarly cautious approach. She isn't seriously grappling with big-picture economic issues such as growing corporate power and weakening union strength, or articulating a grand economic vision that would help liberalism make a big comeback. And yet, for all the talk about her "moderate makeover," analysts say that Hillary is staking out surprisingly progressive positions on some key economic issues. One example: Hillary voted against the biggest trade bill of the new millennium--the Trade Act of 2002, which many criticized as an effort to dramatically weaken Congress's ability to help craft national trade policy--even though Bill sought a similar version of this "fast track" legislation as President. "Bill Clinton had no genuine long-term progressive economic vision--a lot of it was smoke and mirrors," says Chris Slevin, the deputy director of Public Citizen's global trade division. "But now that it's clear that the Clinton free-trade experiment has not delivered on its promises of more jobs in the United States and of progress in Mexico, Hillary has no choice but to take a more thoughtful, progressive approach to trade than her husband ever did."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.