By Joe Klein
A few days after her roughest night as a candidate–the Oct. 30 Democratic presidential debate–Hillary Clinton could be found ambling along a spectacular bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in a town called Clinton, Iowa, with former Vice President Walter Mondale, a ghost of Democratic disasters past. It was the photo op for an endorsement that seemed a potential kiss of death. Mondale is a smart and decent man, but he ran the worst sort of cautious front-runner campaign for the nomination in 1984, was nearly upended by the younger, more dynamic Gary Hart in the primaries and was utterly trounced by Ronald Reagan in the general election, in part because, in an untypically incautious moment in his acceptance speech for the nomination, he said he would raise taxes.
Clinton has been accused of running a cautious front-runner campaign. She is challenged by a pair of dynamic younger candidates in Barack Obama and John Edwards. She has endorsed higher taxes for the wealthy. And more than a few Democrats worry that she cannot win a general election, even against a disgraced and exhausted Republican Party. In other ways, however, Clinton is the furthest thing from Mondale imaginable. A vote for Clinton is, at bottom, a radical proposition. It is a vote for the first woman President, the most dramatic expansion of American possibility since a Catholic was elected President in 1960. In the past six months, Clinton has transformed herself into a far more dynamic campaigner than Mondale ever was. But most important, there is a stark difference in political philosophy between them: Clinton is a pragmatic moderate, and Mondale was an old-fashioned liberal. Bill Clinton rode to the presidency as the champion of an organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, that was founded as a direct reaction against Mondale’s disastrous campaign. Indeed, a few minutes after the photo op, Senator Clinton offered the clearest statement of her own–and her husband’s–philosophy that I’ve ever heard. It came during a brisk question-and-answer session with local residents. A retired dairy farmer complained about the deregulation of his industry and asked what she’d do about it. “During this campaign, you’re going to hear me talk a lot about the importance of balance,” she began, after acknowledging that the Bush Administration had gone too far toward deregulation in most areas. “You know, our politics can get a little imbalanced sometimes. We move off to the left or off to the right, but eventually we find our way back to the center because Americans are problem solvers. We are not ideologues. Most people are just looking for sensible, commonsense solutions.”
It was classic Clinton. And having watched both Clintons for nearly 20 years now, I believe it is an honest summation of what they think they’re about: “Getting stuff done,” as Bill Clinton used to say. That means being flagrantly political, working the system, making the compromises necessary to get the best deal possible to enact their priorities. It is the domestic-policy equivalent of Realpolitik, and it drives partisans crazy on both sides of the political divide. Conservatives go ballistic because they don’t see Hillary Clinton as a moderate at all–she’s a tax-raising, socialized-health-care-loving peacenik feminazi. She and her husband steal conservative memes and tropes to hoodwink the masses. During the political nuclear winter of the 1990s, Yale professor Stephen Skowronek opined that Bill Clinton was the sort of President who inspires a special frenzy in his opponents–Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon were others–because he takes the more accessible parts of their agendas and adopts them. Hillary Clinton inspired an even greater frenzy because she was a gender revolutionary, transforming the cotton-candy role of First Lady into a power position. She wasn’t nearly as charming as her husband either. And she seemed … tougher.
But Senator Clinton has trouble on the left as well, especially in a Democratic primary. The Clintons were always perceived, especially by the populist labor left, as Wall Street fellow travelers on issues like free trade and fiscal conservatism. They were seen as ideological trimmers, betraying the interests of the working class. These days, after seven years of Bush extremism, there is a fury in the Democratic base, an impatience with compromise–with The Politics of Parsing, as Edwards put it in a devastating webcast about Clinton’s performance in the Oct. 30 debate. And so, when Hillary Clinton and I sat down for a chat the day after the Mondale endorsement, I asked her about political balance. Most members of her party would agree that George W. Bush had taken the nation wildly off-kilter to the right, but when had the government been imbalanced to the left? “One would argue that welfare reform was to a great extent a reaction to going off too far in one direction,” she said carefully, acknowledging the success of her husband’s 1996 initiative–although, according to some historical accounts, she had reservations about it at the time. But she quickly moved back to the Bush presidency. “You don’t usually talk about political philosophy” in a political campaign, she said, but the public understands that Bush’s stampede to the right “is exactly what is wrong today … And it has been a dangerous experiment, in my view.”
The resort to Bush-bashing was Clinton’s safety net in the Oct. 30 debate, the place she could go to deflect her opponents’ attacks. But those attacks are likely to grow more intense as the campaign winds toward its Jan. 3 climax in the Iowa caucuses–and the questions of who Clinton is, what she really believes and whether the Democratic Party really wants to return to the pragmatic “balance” of Clintonism will be front and center. This is still a close campaign, at least in Iowa, where the traditionally undependable polls have Clinton with a lead over Obama, and Edwards trending down to third place. Clinton was actually eager to review with me the attacks against her in the debate because those are the issues–and the perceptions about her personality–that she’ll have to confront in the next two months.
The debate seemed a signpost: the beginning of the real campaign after more than a year of fund-raising and inside baseball. And her performance seemed a crystallization of the problems that have always plagued Clinton, the notion that she is perpetually calculating, triangulating and cold, without core convictions. On the other hand, in several dozen interviews over a weekend in Iowa, I simply couldn’t find anyone who had actually seen the debate–not even among the political junkies who attend her meetings. Clinton’s public demeanor at these rallies suggested that she had taken the punch and moved on, even if her campaign briefly made the mistake of playing the gender-victim card in a clunky webcast called The Politics of Pile-On, which showed all the boys repeatedly attacking her. “Look, I was not as artful or as well spoken as I could have or should have been, so I take responsibility for that,” she told me. “But I think there’s also the realization … that we’ve got difficult, difficult problems. I think Americans are ready for substance. I think they want to get beyond the 30 seconds [debate answers], and I think they want to get beyond a President who had never a doubt, never a sense of complexity, never really shared his thinking about anything with them to say, ‘Well, look, this is where we are, here’s where we have to get, here’s how difficult it is, here’s what I need you to do.’”
Actually, Clinton’s debate performances–and her candidacy–don’t seem quite so cautious or fudgy when you look at the transcript or travel with her on the trail. Her worst moments have come when she has tried to have it both ways on programs proposed by fellow New York Democrats. This is a too-clever-by-a-lot tendency she shares with her husband: the hope that she can admire untenable proposals made by other Democrats–like the recent tax reform proposed by Congressman Charles Rangel and Governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses–without actually supporting them. She was caught on the latter in the debate and roundly hammered. But this sort of fudgery is not unusual among politicians. Edwards took the same admiring-but-not-quite-supporting position on driver’s licenses when he was interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos a few days later. In fact, other Democrats–except Christopher Dodd, who flat-out opposed the idea–seemed prohibitively chuckleheaded on this issue: it is hard to imagine why a recent illegal immigrant, unfamiliar with U.S. roads and driving practices, would come forward to get a driver’s license just so that he or she could be held liable in the event of an accident.
The propensity of Democrats to be chuckleheaded in ways easily exploited by Republicans is what Clinton, in most cases, is trying to avoid with her lawyerly answers. Her refusal to support higher Social Security taxes on the wealthy is a perfect example. “For the life of me, I don’t understand what my opponents are trying to achieve,” she said. “It is potentially a trillion-dollar tax increase.” Clinton’s point seems solid on several grounds. There are higher priorities than Social Security in 2008, especially if you want to enact universal health insurance or a real energy-independence plan, both of which will require revenue increases. And why start the negotiations now, in the Democratic primary? History shows, as Clinton attests, that the best way to deal with this issue is through a bipartisan commission, where both sides can share the blame for doing the right thing.
There is a larger problem with the conventional wisdom that Clinton has been too careful and calculating in this campaign. That charge is often expressed as a question about her “authenticity”–that foolish journalistic cliché meant to denote the appearance of informality and spontaneity. But authenticity is not the same as courage. You can fake authenticity. You can’t fake courage. Clinton has always had a problem with authenticity. Her laugh, sometimes awkwardly manufactured for public use yet always delightfully raucous in private, is Exhibit A. But her plans on the big domestic-policy issues–health care and energy–have been courageous and detailed, more sophisticated than her opponents’–and very, very smart politically. Just before our interview, Clinton gave a speech launching her energy-independence proposal. It would drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by auctioning off permits to pollute and is similar to Obama’s–but Obama has added a fillip of honesty by telling his audiences that the program might result in higher energy prices. I asked Clinton why she hadn’t been similarly honest, and she immediately turned it around: Obama wanted to spend the proceeds of the pollution auction–perhaps as much as $50 billion–on alternative-energy research and development. “I have committed to putting money from that auction into programs to … cushion the economic impact on working and poor families,” she said. And then she added scornfully, “So if you want to go and get some debating point telling people this is going to cost you money, then I don’t think you’ve thought through the policy as carefully as you could … This is going to be a tough transition. It’s got to be done politically. One of the ways to make it politically palatable is to rebut the Republican talking point that … it’s another huge tax increase on Americans. You know what? It isn’t.”
There is one area in which Clinton does seem to be fudging unduly for political purposes: foreign policy. Her vote supporting a Senate resolution to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization seems a case in which she took the vote to protect her flank from Republican attacks in the general election. It is a vote that especially rankles Democrats because the resolution was sponsored by the reviled neo-neoconservative apostate Joe Lieberman. Clinton told me she took the vote because she favors economic sanctions against Iran as an alternative to doing nothing, but it was a nonbinding, symbolic resolution that could be construed as supporting Bush in another foolish crusade. The economic sanctions will happen anyway. Clinton then pointed to other Senators–people like Jack Reed, Dick Durbin and Carl Levin–who had voted against the Iraq war and yet supported the resolution, but that’s the sort of argument you make when you can’t convincingly explain your own actions. My guess is that she’s taking political cover on Iran. Clinton’s actual foreign policy positions haven’t been much different from Joe Biden’s or Obama’s. She is rhapsodic about the possibilities of diplomacy, and she has earned the trust of the military because of her hard work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Her refusal to be pinned down on her exact plans for leaving Iraq has been the subject of recent attacks by Edwards. But Edwards’ proposal to immediately withdraw 50,000 troops from Iraq–without saying which troops, from what regions and what the remaining troops would do–demonstrates a careless political expediency on an issue that demands the utmost care.
“She’s run what Washington would call a textbook campaign. But the problem is the textbook itself,” says Obama. There is something to that. The prospect of a woman President is so unusual that there is a real need to sell a textbook political image, the notion that Clinton wouldn’t be much different from, or less tough than, any of her male opponents. There is a need to show her as solid and personally conservative–the sort of person who won’t go crazy on us. And there is the ever present all-too-textbook reality of the Clinton machine: a campaign awash in the dark arts of polling, market-testing and fund-raising (although Obama’s groundbreakingly cool campaign is just as stage-managed). Edwards is right to raise the red flag over Clinton’s successes in milking the health care, insurance, defense and other rancid lobbying sectors for contributions–although Edwards is no boy scout, given his history as a hedge-fund rainmaker and his closeness to the trial lawyers’ lobby.
As I’ve watched Clinton perform over the past year, it has been hard not to admire the sheer effort she’s made–to know the issues, to become a more effective speaker on the stump, to be more personable, to loosen up a little. It is also hard not to admire the sheer, pellucid quality of her intelligence. She has already proved herself an indefatigable campaigner and a deft debater, with a personal confidence that Bill–who always seemed desperate for approval–never had. Rather than collapse under the pressure of what promises to be a tense and thrilling campaign, she seems more likely to break free from the cocoon of her stereotype and emerge from the shadow of her husband’s brilliance. The biggest decisions about Hillary Clinton have yet to be made, and they are largely out of her control. Do people really want a woman President? Do they want the Clinton circus back in town? Do they want to keep trading the presidency between these two weird families? “Who knows?” said Karl Rhomberg, a former Scott County Democratic chairman, after watching Clinton perform in Davenport, Iowa. He pointed out that four years ago, in November, Howard Dean was inevitable, and John Kerry was over. “But 40% were undecided going into the last week of the caucus. It’ll be the same this time. Hillary is 20% smarter than the guys, but a woman has to be just to pull equal. And I can’t stand thinking about what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are going to do to her. People are just sick of that. They love Obama. He’s very inspiring. But in the end, Iowans vote on electability. I hate to say it, but my guess is they’ll vote for the white guy–Edwards–this time, just like they voted for the war hero last time.”
It was a chilling thought. I’m sure Edwards wouldn’t want to win that way, and I’m not so sure he will. But Rhomberg’s scenario wasn’t at all implausible. It certainly raises the central issue of this Democratic campaign: whether Hillary Clinton’s excellence as a candidate will be enough to overcome her family’s garish political history, the undiluted hatred that will be directed against her and the demons that still haunt our nation.
