Paul Wilczynski's Observations

So What's Hillary Up To?

The Nation, in an article written by Greg Sargent called Brand Hillary, says no one has hit it exactly on the head.

Yet if you watch Clinton on one of her upstate swings, as I did earlier this spring, it becomes clear that neither story line gets it right. What's really happening is that Clinton, a surprisingly agile and ideologically complex politician, is slowly crafting a politics that in some ways is new, and above all is uniquely her own.

Clinton's evolving approach -- call it Brand Hillary -- is sincerely rooted in her not-easily-categorized worldview, but it's also a calculated response to today's political realities. In effect, she's taking her husband's small-issue centrism -- its trademark combination of big but often hollow gestures toward the center, pragmatic economic populism and incremental liberal policy gains -- and remaking it in her own image, updating it for post-9/11 America with an intense interest in military issues.

At the same time, she's also experimenting with an increasingly national message about smart government and GOP extremism and testing new, unthreatening ways of revisiting her most politically disastrous issue: healthcare. In one setting after another, she offered the same impromptu-seeming refrain: "You may remember that when my husband was President, I tried to do something about healthcare. Well, I still have the scars to show for it. But I haven't given up." That's a line worthy of the man Hillary married -- you can picture Bill sitting at the kitchen table in Chappaqua, repeating the line and chuckling, "That's good. That's really good."

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 10:21 AM