In its November issue (i.e., before the midterms) The Atlantic published a profile of Hillary Clinton. Last Saturday Josh Marshall recommended it and pointed out that the article had been made generally available on the website.
It’s a valuable piece for anyone interested in assessing the prospects of this formidable politician. Overall the tone is sympathetic, but it doesn’t hesitate to point out the limitations and contradictions of her position.
Jesus and Booze in the Senate
Her intelligence and capacity for hard work are demonstrated in the work on the Health-Care initiative from the first Clinton Administration. She won over many skeptics with her Congressional testimony but failed through her lack of understanding of Congressional process. Her work in the Senate seems above all to have been an attempt to remedy this deficiency. By all accounts she has succeeded admirably. I particularly liked these anecdotes:
At the Wednesday morning Senators-only prayer group:
Senator Sam Brownback’s turn came to lead the group... But as he stood before his colleagues Brownback spotted Clinton, and was overcome with the impulse to change the subject of his testimony... He confessed to having hated Clinton and having said derogatory things about her. Through God, he now recognized his sin. Then he turned to her and asked, "Mrs. Clinton, will you forgive me?" Clinton replied that she would, and that she appreciated the apology.
During a trip to Estonia:
At a casual dinner with Senate colleagues Graham, John McCain, and Susan Collins, all Republicans, the waiter followed local custom by bringing a bottle of vodka and shot glasses, whereupon Clinton reached over and began pouring; a drinking contest ensued. McCain’s staff ... declined my request for an interview, because the last thing a Republican presidential hopeful wants floating around in the media is word that he’s becoming booze pals with Hillary Clinton. And McCain denied the story to Jay Leno. But when I recently intercepted him walking through the Capitol, McCain lit up at the recollection. "It’s been fifty years since I’d been in a drinking game," said McCain, who as a former naval aviator knows whereof he speaks. He added, admiringly, "She can really hold her liquor."
She got on so well with Republican Senators that Karl Rove
sent word last year to halt Republican cooperation with her— an edict that has been ignored. As the atmosphere in Washington has deteriorated, Clinton has emerged within the Senate as the unlikeliest of figures: she, not George W. Bush, has turned out to be a uniter, not a divider.
All this seems admirable to me as far as it goes. And I wonder if something like this isn’t what Obama’s "new kind of politics" boils down to in practice. Not that it’s really new. Bi-partisan collegiality is actually a very old tradition in Washington, especially in the Senate. And doesn’t it work as much to keep substantive reform off the table as it does to advance some kind of national consensus?
The War
Of course, the War has been a problematic issue. The article makes a strong case that Senator Clinton felt misled not on WMD, but on how the President intended to use the authorization:
"I said, ‘Look, I have one question: If the president has this authority, will he go to the United Nations and use it to get inspectors to go back into Iraq and figure out what this guy has?’ [Rice replied,] ‘Yes, that’s what it’s for.’ Privately and publicly, that was the argument they were making."
...
On big issues like the war, Washington judges you not by whether you were right or wrong—at least not in the short term—but by how systematically and formidably you maintain your position... over the last four years she has managed, with lawyerly precision and in politically acceptable gradations, to shift from a stance of Thatcherite fortitude before the war to one of betrayed dismay and anger at the Bush administration afterward without any jarring breach of consistency or abrupt shift in direction. When the judges are scoring you on form, that’s like landing a triple Lutz.
I tend to be harsh on those who voted for the war whether they apologized or not because I was against it for all the reasons that have been borne out by subsequent events. OTOH, I was against the first Gulf War and subsequent opinion has been reasonably approving, so what do I know? This gets pretty close to John Kerry’s justification that the President ought to have the authority in this situation but that it was not a carte blanche for unilateral action. Is there a constructive impulse at work here that is at least extenuating?
The Public Persona
But an important part of Presidential politics is appearing often in large public gatherings.
She has a kind of anti-talent for hitting the right cadence, and her flat, midwestern voice lends itself poorly to impassioned exposition. When she tries to increase her register, it comes out as a sort of strained honk. An odd fact of Clinton’s public persona, an implicit acknowledgment of this shortcoming, is her reliance on sentimental videos to connect with her audience— essentially outsourcing the emotional element of a speech.
This sounds right to me. Overall, it seems that she’s best at winning people over one-on-one. Remember that she launched her first Senate campaign with a listening tour. Ultimately, I think this is the fatal flaw. If people don’t connect to her emotionally her campaign won’t catch on.
Hillary's party
She's fought hard for New York's interests in the Senate and has been tremendously popular as a result. Finally, we get to the crux of the piece:
While she has been fitting herself into the Senate, Clinton has risen to become the dominant figure in Washington’s Democratic establishment.
...
At least in Washington, it’s Hillary Clinton’s party now. What this means in practical terms is that she commands almost all the top talent.
...
Years of tireless study have made Hillary Clinton the consummate insider— but at a time when antiestablishment fervor in the Democratic base is at its highest point in a generation... Clinton has reached the top of the Democratic establishment that once thwarted her. But that is looking like a less viable launching point to the presidency than at any time since she got to Washington.
Summary Judgement
The final assessment is fairly harsh relative to her Presidential ambitions.
Yet it is fair to wonder if Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks. It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime. Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say.
I’ve kept this diary focused on Senator Clinton even though she is not my first choice for the Democratic nomination, because I think her candidacy is important no matter how it turns out. I don’t think she’s the most likely person to get the nomination. But I do think she could win the general election if she were to get the nomination.