I know he didn\’t mean to do it. But , in just two paragraphs of his article for Atlantic Magazine, titled, “An Unabashedly Liberal Hillary Clinton”, – written after Hillary Clinton put out her presidential announcement video, Peter Beinart has done a terrific job of explaining what she is all about.
Here they are:
Here are some of the phrases that appeared in Hillary’s 2000 senate announcement: “voluntary uniform rating system for movies and films,” “welfare,” “more police on the streets,” “teacher testing in the face of boycotts,” “I don\’t believe government is the solution to all our problems” and “parents, all parents, must be responsible.” The message was pure Clintonism, as developed when Bill ran the Democratic Leadership Council in the early 1990s: To deserve government help, people must be morally responsible. And it came naturally to a senate candidate who, although caricatured as a sixties radical, was better described, by a former White House aide, as “a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest.”
All that cultural conservatism is gone in the video she issued last night. It\’s not just the image of a gay male couple holding hands while announcing their impending wedding, followed later by what appears to be a lesbian couple. It\’s not just the biracial couple. Or the brothers speaking Spanish. It\’s also the absence of culturally conservative imagery: no clergymen, no police, one barely noticeable church. Instead, the video starts with a woman who is moving so her daughter can attend a better school. A bit later it features a woman who after staying home with her kids is going back to work. In both cases, there\’s no father in sight. Whether or not Clinton and her advisors were trying to showcase single mothers, they certainly weren\’t afraid of being accused of showcasing them. In 2000, in the wake of a welfare reform debate in which single mothers were made symbols of the moral irresponsibility the Clintons campaigned against, these positive depictions would have been unimaginable.
What do you get out of those paragraphs? Do you get any sense of principle? Any sense of a set of values? Any sense of belief in something?
Or do you get the sense that Hillary Clinton sat down with a bunch of seasoned political professionals, asked them to list out the most advantageous things to do, be and say if you are a Democrat running for President in 2016…then, regardless of what she really thinks (I wonder if Ms. Clinton even remembers anymore) postured herself as being exactly what they told her to be?
Speaking for myself, there is no doubt at all that it is the second of those possibilities.
Which means that Hillary Clinton is……….
You can\’t finish the sentence, because there is no answer. Hillary Clinton is whatever she thinks voters will buy into. Nothing at all to do with any core values or principles, and subject to change based on the next available poll.
Thank you Peter, for explaining Ms. Clinton so well. It\’s not as if we didn\’t already know, but it\’s good to see that you do too…which means there is hope that other leftward liberals might as well.
