Brand Hillary

リンク: Brand Hillary.

Brand Hillary

by GREG SARGENT

[from the June 6, 2005 issue] The Nations

Not long ago, Senator Hillary Clinton went on a 2006 re-election campaign swing through the North Country, that vast expanse of upstate New York that stretches from Albany to the Canadian border. With its mix of family farms and grubby towns struggling with disappearing manufacturing jobs, the region feels less like the Northeast than like the industrial and agricultural Midwest. In other words, it's not a bad place to gauge how Clinton might play in swing-state America.

It's a question that of late has obsessed the pundits, who frequently, and often quite mindlessly, hold up the most obscure of the Senator's utterances or policies--even ones that echo positions she's held for years--as proof that she's readying herself for a 2008 presidential run. The political classes tend to offer us two tidy Hillary narratives to choose from. The first (courtesy of Dick Morris and company) is that Clinton has given herself a moderate makeover designed to mask the fact that she's really a haughty left-wing elitist, in order to appeal to moderate Republicans and culturally conservative, blue-collar Democrats who are deserting their party. The opposing narrative line (courtesy of her supporters) is that Clinton, a devout Methodist, has revealed her true self as a senator; she's always been more moderate than is generally thought, and, as Anna Quindlen wrote recently in Newsweek, "people are finally seeing past the stereotypes and fabrications."

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."

Bill Clinton's political success, of course, sometimes came at great cost to liberal Democrats, and Hillary's brand of politics, too, poses a tough dilemma for liberals and progressives. It asks them to swallow their discomfort with her tactically shrewd but sometimes morally questionable maneuvers on big issues like war and abortion. In exchange they get less visible victories for progressivism, as well as the pleasure of seeing the former First Lady--the figure most loathed by the right in at least a generation--succeed at a time when Democrats are desperate to figure out how to get that winning feeling again.

For liberals it remains to be seen whether this transaction will prove to be a good deal. Yet for some Democrats the trade is indeed worth it, as you could easily see during one of Clinton's first stops on her upstate swing, a speech to Democrats at a re-election fundraiser north of Albany. The event was closed to the press, and the Senator shed her typically demure, bipartisan approach and launched a sharp attack on the GOP. Yet she knew her audience--these were hardly red-meat-craving Democratic activist types. They were rural, moderate Democrats--small-town schoolteachers, librarians, general-store owners. So Clinton's assault was spirited, but even-tempered and larded with patriotic language.

"We're seeing the slow and steady erosion of what made America great in the twentieth century," Clinton told her audience in an even tone. "When I got to the Senate I asked myself, What's going on here? At first I thought the President just wanted to undo everything my husband had done." Clinton waited a beat, then added, "And I did take that personally."

The audience laughed. "But then I thought, Wait a minute. It's not just about turning the clock back on the 1990s.... They want to turn the clock back on most of the twentieth century. They want to turn the clock all the way back beyond Franklin Roosevelt. Back beyond Teddy Roosevelt. That's why they're trying to undo Social Security. Make no mistake about it.

"What I see happening in Washington," Clinton continued, "is a concerted effort by the Administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don't care what party you are--that's not in the American tradition.... Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere. And that is a country where nobody has all the answers--and nobody should have all the power.... We all need to stand up for what made America great--what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world!"

Wild applause rolled over Clinton now, although it was unclear whether the crowd had appreciated the political subtleties of what they'd witnessed. She had offered a critique of the GOP sharp enough for any progressive--even as she'd given an approving nod to American exceptionalism and a paean to US troops defending our "values" abroad. She'd stoked the partisan passions of her audience--even as she'd sounded an above-partisanship note of concern about the state of the Republic. Indeed, she'd managed to pull off what many Democrats struggle to do these days: She'd weaved her criticisms into a larger narrative about America's past and future, criticizing the GOP leadership without sounding as if she wanted America to fail--when she said she was "worried" about America, you believed her.

Not long after that speech, Clinton appeared at a dramatically different event, a speech to a roomful of around 300 farmers. These were hard-bitten people who were fully prepared to believe that the Senator from Chappaqua is who her caricaturists say she is. When Clinton strode into that room, she was an entirely different Hillary from the one who'd addressed Democrats only hours earlier. Anyone accustomed to seeing Clinton on TV--where she sometimes seems stiff and insincere--would have been flabbergasted by her sudden transformation. She instantly, and effortlessly, became Homespun Hillary. Her vowels grew flatter, more rural-sounding. "Little" became "li'l." "Get" became "git." Entire pronouns vanished, as in: "Heard there are some places in California selling gas for three dollars a gall'n." She poked fun at city folk. Speaking about how farmers could make money supplying the specialty produce that New York restaurants need, she mimicked a demand made to her by city restaurateurs: "We need all those little funny things you don't know what they are when they put 'em on your plate."

The crowd seemed especially impressed with her command of their pocketbook issues. She talked about fuel prices, protecting farmers from foreign competition, the Senate's neglect of New York agriculture in favor of Western agribusiness. She touted an initiative she'd spearheaded making it easier for local businesspeople to sell products via the Internet: "Fella made fly-fishing rods and lures--all of a sudd'n found there were people in Norway who wanted to buy th'm!"

By the end, you could feel it: Her audience had been won over. Her listeners filed out, murmuring approval of what they'd heard. As Robert Madison, a Republican and owner of a small local dairy farm with his three sons, put it: "Real down-to-earth person. Knows what she wants to do for the farmer."

To Clinton's friends and advisers, scenes like the above--in which she effortlessly wins over people who, we're told, are supposed to hate her--boost their contention that the real Hillary is ideologically complex and surprisingly down-to-earth. They describe her as genuinely moderate on cultural and national security issues (hence her comfort evoking American values before a Democratic audience), say she has a voracious appetite for policy reminiscent of her husband (hence her mastery of farming arcana) and describe her common-sense economic populism as born of her Illinois upbringing (hence her ability to speak to the economic concerns of farmers).

"People have gained a more complete view of Hillary in the Senate than they had when she was in the White House," says Mandy Grunwald, a close Hillary adviser. "People are getting past the cartoon version of her and seeing that she's culturally moderate and sensitive to rural and small-town America. That mix has always been a part of her."

Of course, to Clinton's critics, particularly on the right, the same scenes just as easily demonstrate the opposite: that her Senate career has been merely a warm-up exercise for 2008. The paeans to American values, the small-town banter, the talk of our troops abroad--it's all a cynical effort to make people forget the Hillary who proposed a big-government takeover of healthcare and banned