NYT Magazine: Mrs. Triangulation (Hillary Clinton)

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/magazine/02hillary.html

7 pages long

Times might actually help the country. Instead, they fuel all this speculation and fill up the pages with stuff that doesn't mean a thing now...

It is good. Not entirely flattering to Hillary, but fair.
On page 5-6 is a section about the activists vs the insiders, I found that interesting.

I didn't read the whole thing: does the phrase "rising above" in respect to her or her campaign appear? they're bound to

is the GOP/RW and the MSM combined with New Suicide Democrats, gun planted firmly in mouth at such a clever angle it will blow off both feet.

The NYT fails to understand the groundswell against the system to which the NYT belongs to more than any form of honest journalism. Nor is the antiwar anti crap groundswell and rallied strength(discovered thanks to the fog clearing capabilities of the Internet) comparable to the 60's youth movement which in turn was not the only segment of the population to turn against the war and looking for honest government.

Nor can anyone take the party anywhere since a larger core than ever are no longer sheeple, no longer reliant on incredibly poor politicians and their skewed advisers. No can anyone hope to take the party who cannot inspire it as much as RFK in direct challenge to the awful dystopia created by the Anti-President, worse than LBJ and without a single redeeming quality that any politicians of any persuasion be afraid to besmirch.

Triangulation is a British strategy and its cost is strangulation, leaving the British with the awful policies of Blair or a return to the Thatcher darkness. Hillary can't even hope for a place on the Humpty Dumpty/TweedleDee seesaw because she, along with well wishing DLC status quo pragmatists(not centrists- the term is meaningless), have not rid the party of self-defeating tendencies but only solidified them in newly destructive ways. Today's status quo is hypocrisy, greed and fascism over all, in case no one in Foggy Bottom noticed. She has her hands locked firmly around her throat while Bush has his wrapped around ours. The balance is all wrong, not viable, not strategic, and not inspirational enough anyway to rise beyond Kerry's efforts.

She can no more win without GOP permission than can the war in Iraq be won without the permission of Iran and Al Qaeda.

A one person fake triangulation by acting like the other side is a patent absurdity, not wisdom. Our chances will be squandered by the continued decades long march to party obscurity, because obscurity is what the DLC.

to honest pursuit of the nations interests.

Like Cindy Sheehan, I regret voting for John Kerry. (Sheehan announces her regrets here: http://www.counterpunch.com/frank10032005.html.)

I shan't be voting for any more pro-war Democrats, least of all Hillary. Sharing liability with Bush for the disaster in Iraq is easily enough reason to reject her, but others come in the form of her support for outsourcing and weasel words on abortion.

The nation is desperate for progressive solutions, but Hillary is a far cry from a progressive. She stoops, you might say, to surrender.

How much support that she's throwing away, how much crime from BushCo, how much suffering among the lower 98%?

Where is a true leader of the real people?

"Chris Matthews, a reliable gauge of predictable Washington wisdom, told his viewers on MSNBC in May. "

take a look at the iddybud blog, talking about some of the crap that's being pulled up there and the money in politics (for bloomberg)... Ferrer is fighting back in the mayor's race. http://iddybud.blogspot.com