Hillary Hostility Growing [View All]

[illinoisprogressive]

Hillary Rodham Clinton is learning the downside of being the front-runner - more Democrats are getting antsy, finding her answers noncommittal, even Republicanesque.

At the seventh Democratic debate, staged at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the audience response to her "I'm not going to answer that" stance was almost hostile.

The former first lady proved critics wrong when she worked hard to be elected twice to the Senate from New York, where she had never before lived. Now she seems so confident of getting her party's presidential nomination that she is already moving to the center of the road to do battle with a Republican opponent, whoever that would be.

Centrism was her husband's strategy, and it ushered them both into the White House in 1993.

But that was before the war in Iraq. It was before 9/11. It was before President Bush began beating the drums to confront Iran about its nuclear ambitions. It was before Israel attacked Syria. It was before actuaries decided that providing Social Security to 80 million people is impossible without higher taxes or lower benefits. It was before her failed effort to reform health care probably doomed the nation to doing nothing for decades. It was before immigration erupted as a political issue.

Candidate Clinton, who voted to authorize the current war, refuses to say U.S. soldiers would be brought home before 2013, a position many Republicans hold. As American casualties mount and all-out civil war looms, the clamor among Democrats is for the troops to come home now.

Increasingly, Clinton is cautious. She calls for yet another commission to examine Social Security, without seeming to have any answers herself. She won't comment on whether Israel would be justified in bombing Iran. She says U.S. troops might have to stay in Iraq to confront al-Qaida operatives. She refuses to concede that her failure to compromise on health care was a mistake (but endorses a plan she refused to consider a decade ago). She bristles when her judgment is questioned on what she has called the most important vote of her career - invading Iraq.

In some ways it's hard to fault her strategy. Primary elections are fought on the edges, with candidates desperate to win the party's base. But in general elections, the nominees sound broader themes, desperate to attract independent voters. In an evenly divided country, nobody can be elected president without winning voters outside his/her party.

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070929/EDIT/709290309/1003