Recurring Headline #1. That would be the "Hillary Clinton's Moves To The Center" articles that showed up after her speech to the DLC. Ms. Clift, writing on MSNBC.com, feels that a hawkish, centrist Hillary is emerging, but even Clift recognizes that it is conscious positioning.
Planting Her Flag
Hillary Clinton is carefully positioning herself as a hawkish centrist. How proving that she is tougher than the boys could work for her in 2008.
Much of the article furthers this meme, in addition to a discussion of how she appears to be consciously pushing the liberals further away from her, in order to try and shed that label.
Hillary’s hawkishness didn’t get as much attention as her gentle rebuke of her fellow Democrats, but gaining credibility on national security was the real message of her DLC speech.
I'm willing to grant that a perceptive lady like Sen. Clinton can gain an understanding that there are people out there trying to kill us, and that maybe taking the fight to the terrorists might indeed be the best policy, but I'm not sure that means that she's abandoning other liberal positions.
There was a post on this over at The Moderate Voice, by David Schraub, who argued that her current positions do not necessarily represent alterations from her prior positions. I commented to that post, and referenced something I had written previously on her husband's pre-election moderation:
On the other hand, there's a bit of a difference between values that one actually holds, and values that one verbally espouses. The suspicion, and given the Clintons' Machiavellian past it may well be warranted, is that Hillary will say what needs to be said to appear moderate, and NARAL and other far left groups simply understand that she has to do that to get elected. Whether those will be the principles she would govern under if elected is another matter entirely.
You do recall, for instance, that in the lead up to the 1992 election her husband was all about a middle class tax cut, don't you? This morphed into the biggest tax increase in history.
Sen. John McCain gets labeled a "maverick" and moderate for going against the party on Republican and conservative positions, and receives media adulation for it. If I'm going to believe the "Hillary as a Centrist" meme it's going to take more than talk. It's going to take both speeches and actual votes that strongly reject liberal positions, maybe even directly contradicting and dismissing the rantings of a Ted Kennedy, and I'd like to see the media laud her for it.
The media, while at times untrustworthy, is not stupid. Being relatively liberal they'd much prefer a Clinton presidency to a continuation of conservative leadership, and they know that Sen. Clinton must be seen as a centrist, whether true or not, to be elected. So this headline will be popping up repeatedly right up to the Monday before election day, 2008
Politicians are in the habit of thinking that the people have a short attention span. I don't. I'm waiting for actual moves, not carefully constructed politically ambitious speech. I'll reserve judgement until then.
UPDATE: Wizbang's Carnival of the Trackbacks XXII.
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