Hillary takes center lane for Presidential run

Man, wouldn't it be great if Hillary Clinton were President? A smart, hard-working, competent, level-headed, common-sensical, non-ideological prez -- everything that W is not. Best of all, she's not a man. None of that embarrassing BS male posturing "bring 'em on" crap.
From the NY Times:

The Evolution of Hillary Clinton by Raymond Hernandez and Patrick D. Healy

As she gears up her re-election campaign for the United States Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton is presenting a side of herself that might have given some of her supporters great pause just a few years ago. Nothing captures this new face of Hillary Clinton better than the Web site her campaign started this week: It portrays her robust stand on national defense and her desire to reduce the number of abortions, among other positions.

In fact, in the last few months, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly confounded the expectations of people who judged her from her White House years. She has appeared publicly with Newt Gingrich, her onetime political foe. She has called abortion a "sad, even tragic choice." She has stood fast in defense of her vote authorizing President Bush to go to war in Iraq. Over the last few weeks, she has found defenders among prominent conservative commentators who feel she was maligned in a new unauthorized biography.

Changing Tone?

It is a striking departure from just five years ago when she was seen as a fierce Democratic partisan and a symbol of the liberal excesses of the Clinton years. Today many Republicans acknowledge somewhat grudging respect for Mrs. Clinton as a senator and say they often find common political ground with her. Mrs. Clinton has become known as anything but the political extremist that many of her critics expected her to be, and has done and said things that have surprised friends and foes alike.

Although she has found allies on the Republican side of the aisle, her public statements and positioning on issues have aroused suspicions that she is setting the stage for a presidential run. Tellingly, some liberals, who make up the core of her political base, have complained that she has been ceding too much to the right, especially in her support for military action in Iraq.

In fact, Mrs. Clinton has defied simple ideological labeling since joining the Senate, ending up in the political center on issues like health care, welfare, abortion, morality and values, and national defense, to name just a few. Some of her positions, particularly on health care, reflect a true evolution. She acknowledges the need for attaining bipartisan consensus and has promoted more incremental approaches in dealing with what was once her signature issue.

On other fronts, she has changed her emphasis. On abortion, she can calibrate the tone and nuance of her remarks. In 2000, she promised abortion rights supporters that she would be second to none as an ally, and in 2005 she said she looked forward to the day when abortions take place "only in very rare circumstances."

On some issues, Mrs. Clinton had put little on the record before joining the Senate, most notably on national defense, but she has taken forceful public positions on this front, including supporting military actions in Iraq. If Mrs. Clinton's critics and her supporters agree on one thing, it is that she has proved to be a nimble political operator since coming to the Senate. In many ways, her approach is reminiscent of what her husband once called "the third way," the path that exploited the political center. So the question is this: What are Mrs. Clinton's core beliefs and have they changed in the years since she took office?

Abortion

Ever since she was first lady of Arkansas, Mrs. Clinton has paired her support for abortion rights with the goal of preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place. Like her husband, she has made "safe, legal, and rare" her mantra on abortion. Doing that has enabled Mrs. Clinton to give Democratic women what they want to hear by championing abortion rights at political rallies, while stressing prevention, sexual education and abstinence when she wants to reach out to the middle.

The national health care plan she helped shape in the early 90's guaranteed that abortion services "would be widely available," as she said at a televised forum in October 1993. At the same time, she said doctors and hospitals could decline to perform them under a "conscience exemption," and she stressed prevention above all.

Running for the Senate in 2000, she promised to outdo the opponent she expected to face, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in their mutual support of abortion rights. "I would want New Yorkers to know that I wouldn't only vote right, but I would be a strong voice, and I would attempt to organize as much as I could to make sure that I defended a woman's right to choose," she told reporters after a National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League luncheon. She has said she would vote against a Supreme Court nominee who opposed abortion rights, and she voted against a ban on a certain kind of late-term abortions in 2003.

Then came her speech on abortion this January, at a time when some Democrats felt they lost the 2004 presidential race because the party was seen as too liberal on social issues. In a speech to New York family-planning advocates in Albany, she used nuanced language about abortion to try to convey that she was no champion of the procedure itself. She called abortion a "sad, even tragic choice" and reached out to opponents perhaps more unequivocally than ever before, judging from a review of several of her speeches and remarks on abortion over time. "I, for one, respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available," she said in January. Toward the end of the same speech, she even described a possible future where "the choice guaranteed under our Constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances."

It was a measure of her power, however, that women's groups were reluctant to criticize that speech despite any private misgivings.

The one part of the abortion debate in which her views show a change is parental notification. While in Arkansas, she says, she supported laws to notify parents when a minor sought an abortion, unless a judge granted an exception. Now in New York, she says she supports the state law of informed consent, which is quite different. Under informed consent, health care providers have to give information about medical options and risks only to patients, including those seeking abortions. In May, Mrs. Clinton drew some fire from conservatives by opposing a Republican-backed bill that would make it illegal for anyone to help under-age girls go out of state for an abortion without their parents' consent. Aides to Mrs. Clinton have said she would support parental notification, with judicial exceptions, in states that do not follow New York's model.

National Defense

One of the most striking facets of Mrs. Clinton's evolution in office has been the credentials she has established in an area that has long been a political strength of Republicans: national defense.

During the Clinton years, her public image was shaped, fairly or not, by her participation in protests against the Vietnam War while she was in college. She also stood in the shadow of a husband known for his often tense relations with the armed services over issues like gays in the military.

In recent speeches and interviews, as well as in votes in the Senate, she has emerged as a staunch ally of the armed services and a strong proponent of a forceful American military presence abroad. On Iraq, for example, she has stood by her vote authorizing the president to wage war and has argued for a greater troop presence there, to the chagrin of some liberals. Mrs. Clinton has had an invaluable platform for weighing in on military issues since 2002, when Democratic leaders offered her a seat on the Armed Services Committee. It was such a surprising assignment for her - no New York senator, Republican or Democrat, had ever served on the committee - that her motives were immediately debated in political circles. Many saw her maneuvering through the prism of political ambitions, saying she was seeking to expand her credibility on defense issues in preparation for a national candidacy in 2008. Her advisers argued that it was critical for her to have a direct hand in shaping defense policy, particularly since New York is a target of terrorists. Whatever her motivations, she has played a larger role in military affairs: proposing pay increases for soldiers, seeking better health benefits for members of the National Guard, visiting troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and arguing forcefully against military base closings.

The Pentagon even appointed her to a panel that meets behind closed doors at the military's Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., to come up with way to improve the nation's military readiness. In the process, her work has won her public praise from Republican members of the Armed Services Committee, many of whom worked with her on legislation to improve the quality of life of military personnel; they include John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina and John W. Warner of Virginia. Her positions contrast with those of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. His campaign was hurt by his vote against an $87 billion appropriation that Mr. Bush had requested for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. People close to Mrs. Clinton say her stance on the military has inoculated her against any charge that she is soft on defense, even as she criticizes some aspects of the president's management of the war in Iraq, like his failure to get wider international support for it.

Health Care

No other policy issue defined Mrs. Clinton in the 90's as starkly as health care. Not only did her effort to establish universal health insurance end in embarrassing defeat for her husband's administration, but it also emboldened Republicans and contributed to the notion that she was a big-government liberal.

More then a decade later, it is clear that that experience has profoundly altered her approach now that she is a member of Congress. She has deliberately avoided the major mistake she made as first lady, namely trying to sell an ambitious plan to a public with no appetite for radical change. Over the last four and a half years, she has stuck to a host of more modest initiatives, apparently mindful of the political perils of overreaching. She summed up her approach in the first floor speech she delivered in the Senate about four years ago, when she unveiled a series of relatively modest health care initiatives. "I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done," she said, referring to the 1994 defeat of her health care plan.

She has not completely discarded her 90's view that there is an urgent need to overhaul the way health care is delivered in the nation. In fact, she has not been shy about embracing proposals that might be seen as liberal in some quarters, like seeking to provide medical coverage to everyone living in poverty. But on the whole, Mrs. Clinton, who has served in a Republican-controlled Congress for most of her tenure, has assembled an agenda with practical-minded initiatives that appear to be aimed at the political center. Perhaps one of the most notable is one that drew support from unlikely quarters: Senator Bill Frist, the conservative majority leader from Tennessee, and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who had a major role in defeating her health care plan in 1994. The bill these three embraced seeks to encourage greater online exchanges of medical information among patients, doctors, medical insurers and other health care experts. Mrs. Clinton has argued that such an approach would, among other things, reduce medical errors resulting from poorly kept paper records and reduce the number of costly malpractice suits.

She has denounced the "contagion" of sex and violence in children's entertainment, apparently attempting to move the issue beyond the question of morality and values, where Republicans have long held a political advantage. Citing studies indicating that graphic images of violence lead to more aggressive behavior among children, she has cast the problem as a health issue that amounts to an epidemic and requires a vigorous response from public health officials. Her longtime focus on children's health has also continued through her Senate service, most notably in the passage of legislation she sponsored ensuring that prescription drugs approved for adults but prescribed for children be tested for children.

Immigration

Among some leading Republicans, there is no better evidence that Mrs. Clinton is positioning herself for a presidential run than her remarks and record on immigration. In office, she has consistently supported expanding legal immigration and improving access to health care and education. With Sept. 11 in mind, she has also cast immigration as a national security issue, pressing the president for more money for border security and highlighting the potential threat of terrorists entering New York and the United States through Canada.

Republicans have made much of a radio interview Mrs. Clinton gave to WABC in 2003, in which she declared, "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigration." She called for a comprehensive system to track these immigrants, some form of entry and exit identification and tighter border controls, and she reluctantly suggested that an identification system for citizens might be needed. "People have to stop employing illegal immigrants," she said in the 2003 interview. "I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau Counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx - you're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work." Those words alone were enough for Republicans to predict that she would position herself to the right of even President Bush on illegal immigration. The conservative commentator Tony Blankley called her remarks "Pat Buchanan-esque" and added, "I never thought I would write the following words, but: God bless Hillary Clinton." Advisers to Mrs. Clinton emphasized that it was just one radio interview that took place two years ago, and that her views on immigration had not changed. That said, her Senate record on the issue is not as rigidly hostile to illegal immigration as some conservatives say.

She was a cosponsor of a bipartisan bill that would give amnesty for many illegal workers in the agricultural industry. She also backed a bill by Senator Edward M. Kennedy that would grant permanent resident status to some illegal immigrants who had been in the country for at least five years and worked for at least two years. She supported college tuition relief for young people who had entered the county illegally. Those positions have mostly been overlooked, however, as Republicans have sought to rally their donor base and grass roots by citing illegal immigration as one more sign that she is moving to the political center.

GOOD luck, Hillary. Let's face it, she has surprised critics and supporters alike. Under President Hillary, we could be once again proud of what America stands for. It's time we had a great President again. God, is it time.