Bozell Column: Hillary's No Moral Conservative

For decades now, the national media have insisted in each presidential election cycle that voters should ignore the liberal wizards hiding behind the curtain of the Democratic Party. Each plausible Democratic presidential contender is a "moderate" or "centrist," be he Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. But now to describe Hillary Clinton as a "moral conservative" is so upside down and backwards it sounds like.... "This is your brain on drugs."

That’s what Time reporter Amy Sullivan announced on Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC. She suggested Hillary might be "fairly liberal" on economic issues, "but she’s a moral conservative." Sullivan was once an aide to Sen. Tom Daschle. In Hillary Clinton, Sullivan has allegedly found an authentic Christian conservative’s role model.

What makes Hillary a "moral conservative" in the eyes of a Time reporter? For starters, she’s a darling of gay-left groups like the Human Rights Campaign. Early in her Senate tenure, she voted against the Jesse Helms amendment to deny federal funds to public schools that would ban the Boy Scouts from their meeting rooms, and for the Barbara Boxer amendment to allow such punitive action against the Scouts with no threat to their money from Washington.

Like Al Gore, she campaigned in 2000 against the "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy for gays in the military, and accused her GOP opponent for being "out of the mainstream." In fact, on October 6, 2001, Hillary was the keynote speaker for the Human Rights Campaign’s big annual fundraising dinner. She pledged she would keep lobbying for "hate crimes" legislation and "domestic partner" benefits and declared that gays who lost lovers on 9/11 should get the same federal assistance as "other families."

Oh, she’s that kind of moral conservative.

The HRC was so pleased that they put a Hillary quote in big letters in their annual report where she stressed a royal "our" in her solidarity with the nation’s largest gay-left advocacy group: "What counts is our energy, our determination, our honesty, our integrity, our talent. That...is what is represented in this room tonight." In her first two years, Senator Clinton had a perfect 100-percent voting score from the gay "liberation" lobby. Since then, she and her fellow New York Senator, Chuck Schumer, have identical 88 percent pro-gay scores in each of the last two sessions of Congress.

In March, HRC posted video of Hillary at a fundraising lunch, praising them for attacking conservatives resisting leftist trends like so-called "gay marriage." In proposing a marriage amendment to the Constitution, the conservatives were being divisive, engaging in "wedge politics at its worst," and acting "against the entire forward movement of American history."

I wonder if, when viewed through the lenses of Time magazine, these are immoral conservatives?

That was nothing compared to Sen. Clinton’s fierce solidarity with the abortion lobby: routine 100 ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice America, routine zeroes from the National Right to Life Committee.

On the last Sunday morning in April of 2004, while many Americans were in church, the hard-left warriors of abortion advocacy gathered for a march on Washington which they called a "March for Women’s Lives." The star of this march was moral conservative Hillary Clinton, dressed in her trademark black pantsuit – this time, with a hot pink blouse to match the official Planned Parenthood T-shirts.

The abortion-on-demand crowd wailed for her, reserving for her the biggest applause of the day, according to an account in The Nation magazine. The major media, from ABC and CBS to NPR and The New York Times, presented Hillary to the nation with a brief soundbite, a bland declaration that everyone should register and vote for Kerry for President.

Only the AP offered a different soundbite of the day, in which she trashed Team Bush: "This administration is filled with people who disparage sexual harassment laws, who claim the pay gap between women and men is phony ... who consider Roe vs. Wade the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history." No one at AP was going to ask her which atrocious Bush official she was describing. It was especially odd to hear Hillary Clinton accuse some other White House of being lax on sexual harassment, considering her husband’s flagrant violations, and her failure to stop them. For the media it was another day, another whitewash.

Amy Sullivan is a typical liberal reporter/activist trying to close the "God gap" between the Democrats and the Republicans. She has a book coming out next year on "how and why" the Democrats will win over religious voters. I wonder if she believes Hillary is moving closer toward God, or if the news is that God is moving toward Hillary.