CAMPAIGN 2008
Hillary the Hawk
Sen. Clinton goes to war.
BY FRED BARNES
Saturday, May 10, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
A week after the start of the war in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld gave a briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the time, the advance of American troops toward Baghdad supposedly was bogged down--it turned out it really wasn't--and the Bush administration was facing stiff criticism. But the defense secretary got strong support from an unexpected source, the newest member of the committee, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
Alluding to her own experience in an administration under fire, she indicated she understood Secretary Rumsfeld's situation. Then Sen. Clinton assured him the committee was behind him 100% and would provide anything he needed. The key is to win the war, she said. The war effort should not be shortchanged in any way.
This new side to Sen. Clinton--the national-security side--may surprise both fans and foes as she emerges in greater public view this spring. She attracted attention last week when she stridently attacked President Bush's domestic policies. Next month, she'll draw a lot more when her memoir of her White House years, "Living History," is published. The book is lucrative (advance: $8 million) but it may be unhelpful politically, raising new questions about Sen. Clinton's truthfulness, ethics and relationship with her husband.
Though not a candidate, Sen. Clinton is also sure to grab attention in the 2004 Democratic presidential race. In nearly every national poll in which her name is included, she leads the Democratic field. In the Quinnipiac Poll in February, she topped her nearest rival, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, 42% to 15%.
A grass-roots drive to draft Sen. Clinton as a presidential candidate is almost inevitable later this year. Her all but certain answer: I promised the voters of New York I'd serve the full six years of my Senate term, and I will. Later, a new boomlet is unavoidable--Hillary for vice president. This, too, she's likely to reject.
Sen. Clinton's not-so-secret target is 2008. President Bush, if he gains a second term, will be leaving office. The presidential contest in both parties should be wide open. A popular senator from a large state, re-elected to a second term in 2006 and supported by the dominant wing of her party, would have a shot.
So Sen. Clinton's moves should be seen in light of a 2008 campaign. It's not that every step she takes is solely (and cynically) designed to aid a presidential run. Rather, it's that every significant move on Sen. Clinton's part, including last week's anti-Bush tirade, will affect her presidential aspirations. She and her advisers know this.
Politically speaking, Sen. Clinton is a long-distance runner. Elected in 2000, she initially stuck to state issues in the Senate, notably federal aid to New York City after 9/11. She minimized her national role. She gave few interviews, spoke to only a handful of national groups, and mostly stayed away from Sunday interview shows. Given her prominence, Sen. Clinton was essentially in hiding for two years.
During that time, she changed her position on the Middle East. When her husband was president, she advocated a Palestinian state before that was American policy and famously kissed Yasser Arafat's wife after Mrs. Arafat delivered a viciously anti-Israel speech. Now Sen. Clinton is reliably pro-Israel. She signed a letter recently supporting the president's insistence on new Palestinian leadership to replace Arafat.
Her pro-Bush stand on the war with Iraq was clear even before the Senate voted last October to give him the authority to oust Saddam Hussein. On "Meet the Press" last September, Tim Russert asked if she believed disarmament in Iraq was possible without regime change. "I doubt it," she said. What President Bush was doing "is exactly what should be done." With or without United Nations blessing, she said, the president "has to do what he believes is in the best interest of the country."
Sen. Clinton's position on the war is faintly similar to her husband's take on the Gulf War in 1991. He said he would have voted for the war resolution but agreed with the arguments of the opponents. She has cited qualms about pre-emption and unilateral action. And like her spouse, she avoided the limelight on the war issue. Her pep talk to Secretary Rumsfeld was at a closed-door meeting.
It took weeks of prodding by Deborah Orin of the New York Post to get Sen. Clinton's office to issue a statement on March 2 saying she "fully supports" President Bush's actions to disarm Iraq. But in case that might have angered antiwar Democrats, the next day she noted her preference for a peaceful solution. And to avoid appearing too pro-Bush, she added on March 4 that she didn't "agree 100%" with the president on the war. No doubt the Clinton camp was thunderstruck by a Quinnipiac Poll in late April that found her trailing Mr. Bush 47% to 44% in a 2004 presidential matchup in New York, a state the president lost by 25 points to Al Gore in 2000. In upstate New York, where Sen. Clinton did surprisingly well in her 2000 Senate race, she trailed Mr. Bush 63% to 26%. Political consultant Dick Morris, who worked for Bill Clinton and knows Sen. Clinton well, claims her popularity is strongest when she says little and stays in the political background. But the poll showed low visibility has a downside and within days she was excoriating the president in a speech in Connecticut.
The speech was noteworthy for several reasons. She did what politicians often do when their support slips. She stirred up her base, the Democratic Party's liberal core. Sen. Clinton shouted and shrieked about Mr. Bush. It worked. The 1,500 Democrats at the event gave her numerous standing ovations.
The administration, she said, has "the most wrongheaded economic policies that we've seen since Herbert Hoover, and we're beginning to pay a price as a nation for these policies." She spoke sarcastically about Mr. Bush and health care. "I just didn't have any idea universal health care for Americans was going to start in Baghdad," Sen. Clinton declared. "It was just not on my agenda."
And she invoked what has become a Democratic trope: "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say, 'We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.' " Of course no one has actually called Democrats unpatriotic for simply disagreeing with the president.
Where does all this leave Sen. Clinton? She's as liberal as ever on domestic and social issues, but eager to erase the chief vulnerability of liberal Democrats--dovishness on national security. She's devoted much of 2003 to boning up on military issues before the armed services committee.
Mr. Morris argues she's electable in 2008. That sounds farfetched, but then it struck many as preposterous when she was first mentioned as a possible Senate candidate in New York. She proceeded to conduct a flawless campaign in 2000, shed her image as a carpetbagger, emerge from her husband's shadow, and win in a landslide. At the moment, the idea of Sen. Clinton as the 21st-century equivalent of a Cold War liberal seems contrived and unconvincing. But in 2008, who knows?
Mr. Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, is co-host of "The Beltway Boys" on the Fox News Channel.
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003479
May 10, 2003
7:13pm EDT |
