by Dish Staff
Fallows is troubled by Clinton’s recent comments:
[I]n this interview—assuming it’s not “out of context”—she is often making the broad, lazy “do something” points and avoiding the harder ones. She appears to disdain the president for exactly the kind of slogan—”don’t do stupid shit”—that her husband would have been proud of for its apparent simplicity but potential breadth and depth. (Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?) Meanwhile she offers her own radically simplified view of the Middle East—Netanyahu right, others wrong—that is at odds with what she did in the State Department and what she would likely have to do in the White House. David Brooks was heartened by this possible preview of a Hillary Clinton administration’s policy. I agree with Kevin Drum and John Cassidy, who were not.
Ezra thinks the interview demonstrates that Clinton’s nomination isn’t inevitable:
There is a pattern that has emerged in almost every recent interview Clinton has given: liberals walk away unnerved. She bumbled through a discussion of gay marriage with Terry Gross. She’s dodged questions about the Keystone XL pipeline. She’s had a lot of trouble discussing income inequality. I initially chalkedsome of this up to political rust. I am quickly revising that opinion.
Waldman sees Clinton’s disregard of the liberal base as a consequence of her not having a viable Democratic challenger:
Over the next two years there will probably be more situations in which Clinton winds up to the right of the median Democratic voter. That would be more of a political problem if she had a strong primary opponent positioned to her left who could provide a vehicle for whatever dissatisfaction the Democratic base might be feeling. But at the moment, there is no such opponent. Her dominance of the field may give her more latitude on foreign affairs — not to move to the right, but to be where she always was. Neither Democrats nor anyone else can say they didn’t see it coming.
Scott McConnell despairs:
George W. Bush once had the wit to joke about major financial elites being his “base”, but with Hillary the gap in attitudes between the major money people and the base of Democratic voters is substantial, and no joking matter.
As yet, amazingly, Hillary has no real opponent to the nomination. Centrist inside politics watchers have concluded her Goldberg interview means that she carefully calculated that she can run to the right and face no consequences. It’s probably true that most of the names floating about, Brian Schweitzer and Elizabeth Warren pose little threat to a Clinton coronation. But someone who could talk coherently about foreign policy—James Webb, for instance—might be a different matter, though no one besides Webb himself knows if he has the discipline and energy to take on what would a grueling, and probably losing campaign. The absence of the genuine challenger to a hawkish Hillary leaves one depressed about the state of American democracy.
However, Noam Scheiber thinks Clinton’s comments are risky:
Team Obama has calculated that it’s in the president’s interest to see Clinton succeed him. I suspect that will remain the case, Axelrod’s venting notwithstanding. But Obama’s advisers are not the same as Obama’s donors, many of whom have never loved the Clintons and still don’t to this day. A few more comments like this and many will be happy to ante up for Warren or some other challenger—perhaps even Biden, whose loyalty to the president many Obama donors consider his most important quality.
Tomasky agrees with Hillary brushing off the Democratic Party’s base. But, he writes, “I don’t think she’s a neocon hawk”:
[U]nlike McCain, who preens his way around Washington saying that that ISIS’s strength is entirely Obama’s fault, at least Clinton says, “I don’t think we can claim to know” what would’ve happened had the FSA been armed two years ago. That’s a humility the neocons lack. It’s a crucial distinction, and it’s a pretty damn important quality in a president.
How Philip Klein understands the game Clinton is playing:
Clinton is trying to strike a balance — she wants to distance herself from President Obama on foreign policy in areas in which he’s viewed as a failure, but she wants to preserve the veneer of experience that comes with having served as his Secretary of State. The problem she’s going to run into is that it’s easy to see how these two goals could conflict with one another. To the extent that Clinton touts her vast experience as Obama’s Secretary of State, it becomes more difficult to separate herself from the administration’s foreign policy.
Suderman gets the last word:
She wants to suggest some differences between herself and Obama, but not with any clarity, and not in a way that creates any real distance between them. And she’ll probably want to keep most of whatever differences she does reveal confined to the realm of foreign policy, partly because that’s where her experience is, and partly because the Democratic base isn’t likely to support major departures in domestic policy. Which means that unless there’s some big, unexpected break coming, she’ll essentially be running as a slightly more hawkish version of Obama. Inevitably, that means she’ll be tied to Obama’s less-than-popular presidency and controversial domestic agenda. Unless Obama’s current approval ratings improve—which of course they could over the next two years—that’s not great a place to be.
The Dish 