How She Would Govern - Democratic Underground

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Sun Sep-09-07 01:24 PM
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How She Would Govern

Using her time as First Lady, Newsweek thinks they know:

How She Would Govern
A year before the election, Hillary Clinton seems like the safest money in the 2008 race. So what kind of leader would she be?

Sept. 17, 2007 issue - Hillary Clinton has been in politics long enough to know the value of the word "change." In 1992, her husband's political guru, James Carville, hung a white sign in the Clinton campaign war room that read CHANGE VS. MORE OF THE SAME. Bill Clinton won the presidency that year with 370 electoral votes.

What no one could see was that the First Lady had been taking stock all along. Clinton launched her campaign for the Senate in July 1999 at Moynihan's farm in upstate New York. (The elder statesman was retiring from the Senate; he died in 2003.) The symbolism was clear: this new Hillary would work for common cause with reasonable people, whether they agreed with her entirely or not. Early in the campaign, some in New York's Democratic Party concluded that the candidate was too polarizing to make headway in conservative upstate New York and should focus solely on boosting her margins in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. But Clinton was eager to wade into unfriendly territory. Howard Wolfson, Clinton's senior communications adviser then and now, recalls her turning to him after a positive reaction from an audience on an early trip upstate. "We should be spending more time up here," she said. She was right; Clinton won her Senate seat with 55 percent of the vote, thanks in part to the long hours she'd spent talking about small issues upstate. Searching for Capitol Hill office space with Tamera Luzzatto, her new chief of staff, Clinton learned that a stately open suite in the Russell Senate Office Building had belonged to Moynihan. Luzzatto and Clinton looked at each other and said, "Karma—we've got to go for it."

But the real evidence about what kind of president Hillary would be may lie in the things she isn't saying—or isn't saying yet. Friends and advisers say that the current Iraq debate obscures a simple truth about Hillary Clinton: 15 years inside The System have made her a fervent believer in the strong, smart management of American power. "At this stage of the '91 campaign, Bill Clinton didn't know anything about the use of power and only a limited amount about international affairs," says a top aide who was aware he was deviating from campaign script and would discuss Clinton's thinking only anonymously. "She's tougher than he is. She's not going to advertise that during the primary process. But everyone who knows her knows that."

Or at least those who think they know her. It is a curious fact of the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton has been part of American life for so long and yet the details of her thinking, and the ways in which she makes decisions, are so little understood. To get the chance to change the country, she will have to make the case that she herself has changed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20649206/site/newsweek/page/0/

Video at link as well: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid452329876/bctid1173351841