Hillary and Bobby

In today's issue of The Times Magazine, there is a lengthy article about Hillary Clinton. According to the current rumors, she will be seeking the Democratic nomination for president. At one time, she had my unswerving support, but now I have to say I am a little apprehensive about her stance on certian issues, like Iraq for instance. However, only time will tell if I will even have to make a decisive choice about her. ~Charee

Mrs. Triangulation
NYTimes
By MATT BAI Published: October 2, 2005

If Hillary Clinton is re-elected to the Senate next fall and runs for president in 2008, she will be the first New York Democrat to make a serious bid for the White House since Robert F. Kennedy, who used the same Senate seat as his springboard 40 years earlier. The parallels and contrasts between the two candidates are considerable. Like Clinton, Kennedy was accused of trading on his famous name when he moved to New York and ran for the Senate, his first elective office, in 1964. And like Clinton, Kennedy enjoyed rock-star status in his brief Senate career, which from its first day was shadowed by speculation that he would seek the White House. Kennedy, too, was perceived, by critics, as strident and sanctimonious, inspiring frenzied vitriol from his detractors and unswerving loyalty from his followers. And Kennedy's moment, like Clinton's, was dominated by a war that was becoming increasingly unpopular - a war he had more than tacitly supported as his brother's confidant during those first years of American involvement in Vietnam.

HILLARY REFRACTED

The senator's ideology is perhaps best understood through the prism of her upbringing as a Republican and a Methodist. The similarities end there, and somewhat abruptly. Kennedy, pushed to abandon his ambivalent stance toward Vietnam by the party's younger, antiwar leaders, underwent in the Senate a very public evolution in his convictions about the war abroad and poverty at home. His rise as a national figure coincided with, and to some extent made possible, the rise of social liberalism as the dominant force in Democratic politics. Ultimately, Kennedy's campaign to cleanse the Democratic soul, and his own, took on almost religious overtones, even before his assassination at the Ambassador Hotel.

Clinton, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with ideological crusades, and she has thus far resisted the pull of rising antiestablishment forces - bloggers, donors and activists - who are fast becoming today's equivalent of the 60's left. Instead, Hillary (as she is universally known) has navigated with extreme caution through the party's fast-changing landscape, and if she has evolved as a public figure, it is in a way that has distanced her from the party's more liberal base. She has never renounced her initial support for the invasion of Iraq, and has in fact lobbied for recruiting an additional 80,000 Army troops. She has recently taken the opportunity, in much publicized speeches, to denounce unwanted pregnancies and violent video games. And at a time when the new activists brand any bipartisan cooperation as treachery, Clinton seems to pop up every week next to some conservative who has joined her on an issue like health-care modernization or soldiers' benefits.

In fact, among pundits and strategists of both parties as well as the reporters who cover them, a story line about Clinton has now taken hold, and it goes like this: While she is at heart a more stridently liberal and polarizing figure than her husband, Hillary Clinton is now consciously reinventing herself publicly as a middle-of-the-road pragmatist. According to this theory, she has resolved, along with her cadre of canny advisers, to brazenly "reposition" herself as the kind of soothing centrist that middle-class white voters might actually accept as the first female president. "A couple of weeks ago, certainly a couple months ago, Hillary was off there on the left," Chris Matthews, a reliable gauge of predictable Washington wisdom, told his viewers on MSNBC in May. "We thought of her with Barbra Streisand, Barbara Boxer, Rob Reiner, Chuck Schumer even. Now I see her as sort of part of this drift toward the center."

The problem with this idea, which goes virtually unchallenged in Washington, is that it simply trades one caricature for another. Hillary the war-protesting, Joni Mitchell-loving feminist has now been transformed into Hillary the calculating Lady Macbeth who will deliver any speech handed to her if it helps reclaim her husband's throne. Neither stereotype, in fact, is especially credible, and neither helps to resolve the puzzle of where Hillary Clinton actually wants to take her party - beyond, perhaps, returning it to the White House.

To read more of this article, please go to http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/magazine/02hillary.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib