Here’s something a little more coherent than “Hillary moves right.”
Bill biographer John Harris, in the Washington Post, writes that “the recent record makes it clear that Hillary Clinton has staked her future on precisely the same brand of centrist political strategy that her husband fashioned a decade ago — using many of the same advisers and relying on familiar tactics.
“The strategy, confidants say, has three elements.
“On social issues, it is to reassure moderate and conservative voters with such positions as her support of the death penalty, and to find rhetorical formulations on abortion and other issues — on which her position is more liberal — that she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values. On national security, it is to ensure that she has no votes or wavering statements that would give the GOP an opening to argue that she is not in favor of a full victory in Iraq. In her political positioning generally, it is to find occasions to prominently work across party lines — to argue that she stands for pragmatism over the partisanship that many centrist voters especially dislike about Washington.”
Also in the piece, nice anecdotal stuff, a good point about the personal loyalty she’s inspired, and details on her role in the early debacles of the Clinton White House.
(via Political Wire)
