Paul Wilczynski's Observations

NYT: Mrs. Triangulation

Matt Bai, in a New York Times Magazine article (registration required), discusses where he thinks Hillary really sits.

... 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. ...

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 1:17 PM