Clinton’s shift to the left smacks of expediency
As a member of the human race, Hillary Clinton no doubt has a spine. But her backbone has been more than a little difficult to detect in recent weeks as she opts for one politically expedient position after another ahead of Tuesday's first Democratic debate.
She has decided to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, trade pact. She’s against the Keystone oil pipeline. And she wants to repeal the so-called Cadillac tax on high-end health insurance plans.
These initiatives are all opposed by vocal and well-organized constituencies, generally ones that reside in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. But all are economically beneficial:
What does she really believe?
The TPP is key to checking China’s ambitions in Asia and the Pacific. Absent the United States, many of the 11 other countries involved would seek a new deal with China at its center, one that would be more permissive of China’s way of doing business and would give it considerable leverage over neighbors with which it has territorial disputes.
As a former secretary of State, Clinton is well aware of this. In fact, she played a modest role in negotiating the pact and once called the developing accord the “gold standard in trade agreements.”
As a former secretary of State, she also knows how useful it would be for Canada and the U.S. to have a pipeline linking western Canada with Gulf Coast refineries, one that would reduce U.S. dependence on oil imports from nations hostile to American interests. In fact, she signaled support for the Keystone pipeline in 2010 and, as recently as this July, declined to take a position.
As the architect of the ill-fated health care reform proposal offered during her husband’s administration, the former first lady is well aware that the Cadillac tax is widely supported by health care economists as a way of controlling medical costs.
The positions she has taken are the easy way out. They involve siding with unions, environmental groups or those who advocate throwing yet more taxpayer subsidies into the health care system. They might not even be good politics, as they will make it more difficult for her to move back to the center for the general election if she wins her party’s nomination.
With the Republican Party drifting further and further to the right, and the turmoil in the GOP-controlled House, Democrats could easily occupy the vacuum in the political mainstream. Instead, they are undertaking their own centrifugal lunge, in their case leftward, embracing the quixotic and often unaffordable ideas espoused by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
As the best-positioned candidate in decades to win her party’s nomination, Clinton had been poised to resist the Sanders pull and to lead the party to a potentially dominant position in presidential politics. Instead, she’s bending under pressure from Sanders’ unexpectedly strong challenge.
Whether these policy shifts will help her politically is questionable. Polls show Clinton’s greatest vulnerability doesn’t have to do with individual issues but with qualms about her reliability and trustworthiness. Waffling on so many important issues only reinforces those doubts.