Can Hillary Clinton Win Over the Left?
It's a question Michelle Goldberg ponders in a long and nuanced article at The Nation.
Hillary is from her formative years a liberal and a progressive, she says, but hard political experience has caused her to take a "pragmatic" path and to often "over-correct," to the point where it's become reflex for her:
Earlier this year, Buzzfeed uncovered a 1979 television interview with Hillary
Clinton—then Hillary Rodham—who had just become first lady of Arkansas. In the half-hour video, we see a young woman in oversize glasses, calm and smiling as the host grills her about whether she’s too liberal, too feminist, too career-oriented to fit into her new role...
After nearly 20 minutes of this sort of thing, the host asks Clinton what she finds attractive about Arkansas...
Appearing eager to finally ingratiate herself, she replies by pouring scorn on urban America...
This exchange exemplifies a dynamic we would observe over and over for more than two decades. For the first half of her political life, Hillary Clinton was consistently painted as so far left—so feminist—that it threatened her husband’s political viability. Whenever that viability was in doubt, she would overcorrect, trying to convince a skeptical mainstream press that she wasn’t nearly as liberal as she seemed. Eventually, the strategy of triangulation—using the left as a foil to prove her moderate bona fides—became nearly reflexive.
But times have changed, and now her problem is to win over those who have been angered and alienated over the years by her triangulation against the left:
In recent years, however, America’s political context has been transformed... policies once supported by a smug centrist consensus—from Wall Street deregulation to military adventurism in the Middle East—have proved themselves failures, pushing the center of gravity in the Democratic Party to the left. Triangulation has become passé.
This means that, in a historical irony, Hillary Clinton now needs to convince progressives that she really is who she was once widely believed to be. She is running for president as a progressive feminist, something that would have been utterly quixotic when she entered public life. In a major address on the economy in July, Clinton emphasized the importance of women’s equality in a way that no mainstream candidate has done before, describing equal pay, accessible childcare, and fair scheduling as key to economic growth. She’s making paid leave a signature issue....
Yet after spending so many decades trying to shed her reputation for liberalism, Clinton has amassed a record that many on the left find troubling, if not unforgivable...
Goldberg makes a good case that Hillary has at least been consistent over the years in one area -- on issues of concern to women, though with some prominent gaps:
According to Melanne Verveer, her
former chief of staff, after healthcare reform failed, Hillary pleaded with her husband to expand the coverage for children, which he did through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, passed in 1997. And Hillary remained particularly strong on women’s issues. In 1995, as the head of the American delegation to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held that year in Beijing, Clinton gave a speech that is widely seen as a watershed moment in the history of the global women’s-rights movement. “Twenty years later, you can see it really did begin this massive shift on how we look at gender and development,” says Heather Hurlburt, a former White House and State Department speechwriter who served as a consultant to Clinton when she was a US senator. “You have a dramatic change in the degree to which development is focused on women and women’s health and reproduction.”
However she failed to oppose her husband's welfare reform, and continued to embrace it even during her Senate run in 2000.
On so many other issues her record is very mixed: she voted against CAFTA, worked closely with ACORN in New York, voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and as SoS advocated for intervention in Libya, promoted fracking overseas, and is currently very reliant on fossil-fuel industry lobbyists for her campaign funding.
She's a complex political figure, and a creature of an environment shaped by the ascent of the right-wing movement.
In many ways, the progressive debate over Hillary Clinton is all about the limits of pragmatism: How much compromise can be excused by good intentions? When does realism become a complacent acceptance of the status quo? [Larry Cohen, the recently retired president of the Communications Workers of America], for his part, refuses to call Clinton “pragmatic.” He prefers the word “practical,” arguing: “Pragmatic people believe in problem solving. Practical people often tell us why we can’t solve problems that we care deeply about.”
And that's really what it comes down to, isn't it? Can we move forward on dealing with the real problems of the country, like income inequality, racism, the lack of affordable universal medical care, poverty, the loss of jobs, failing infrastructure, and so much more? Or is it just a matter of our leaders now massaging us into accepting that major change is no longer possible, and that the status quo is not really that bad, if we just give it a few tweaks.
There are those, on the other hand, like Bernie Sanders, who have kept to their political principles over decades, working tirelessly toward their goals, sometimes just incrementally, no matter what the political or cultural headwinds against them.
How much does it matter that Hillary Clinton did not, but instead "over-corrected" to fit in with the times?
Some would say that was just clever politics, and that she's a survivor, and that all those compromises over the years she's made to survive shouldn't give us pause, because now it's brought her to the place where she can act on what she really believes.
I wonder though. We are the sum of all our actions and decisions through the years. What else can voters judge on but that, and the person those actions and decisions have made her become.