Hillary Clinton is not a weatherman, but she knows, or at least believes, that the wind is blowing in favor of liberalism, according to The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart.
“I watched Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement video alongside the one she issued in 2007, and the speech she gave declaring her senate candidacy in New York in 2000,” wrote Beinart in a Monday post. “The upshot: America, as seen by Hillary and the people advising her, is a lot further left than it was a decade or two ago.”
Beinart noted that the video’s liberal rhetoric and imagery isn’t in response to a primary challenger (though it may be a pre-emptive strike) and speculated that with the country supposedly moving to the left, old-school triangulation may have gone by the boards: “Since they entered national politics more than two decades ago, the Clintons have expended enormous energy protecting themselves from right-wing attack. The message of yesterday’s announcement video was that Hillary thinks that in the America of 2016, she no longer has to play that game.”
From Beinart’s piece, headlined “An Unabashedly Liberal Hillary Clinton” (bolding added):
Every presidential campaign is a bet on the American mood at a given moment in time. I watched Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement video alongside the one she issued in 2007, and the speech she gave declaring her senate candidacy in New York in 2000. The upshot: America, as seen by Hillary and the people advising her, is a lot further left than it was a decade or two ago.
Here are some of the phrases that appeared in Hillary’s 2000 senate announcement: “voluntary uniform rating system for movies and films,” “welfare,” “more police on the streets,” “teacher testing in the face of boycotts,” “I don’t believe government is the solution to all our problems”…The message was pure Clintonism, as developed when Bill ran the Democratic Leadership Council in the early 1990s: To deserve government help, people must be morally responsible. And it came naturally to a senate candidate who, although caricatured as a sixties radical, was better described, by a former White House aide, as “a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest”…
All that cultural conservatism is gone in the video she issued [Sunday] night. It’s not just the image of a gay male couple holding hands while announcing their impending wedding, followed later by what appears to be a lesbian couple. It’s not just the biracial couple. Or the brothers speaking Spanish. It’s also the absence of culturally conservative imagery: no clergymen, no police, one barely noticeable church...
The video Hillary released yesterday was also devoid of soldiers. And it contained no discussion of foreign policy. Compare that to Hillary’s 2007 video, the first substantive words of which were: “let’s talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq and to restore respect for America around the world.” Later in that video, she championed her work “protecting our soldiers”…
Today, Republicans still see foreign policy as politically central. Jeb Bush dwelled on it in the video he released in response to Hillary’s. And, of course, Clinton will spend plenty of time talking foreign policy as the campaign wears on. But the message of yesterday’s announcement video, unlike the one in 2007, is that international affairs are secondary. The core of Hillary’s campaign will be economics. More specifically, it will be championing the “everyday Americans” who face a “deck still stacked in favor of those at the top.” That kind of swipe at the ultra-rich was absent from Hillary’s announcements in 2000 and 2007 too.
It’s striking that, absent serious primary competition that might have forced her left in the primaries, Hillary has gone left anyway: with culturally progressive imagery, a class-oriented economic message, and a purely domestic focus. If the aim was to produce something fresh, the Clinton campaign succeeded. One reason the announcement felt fresh was because since they entered national politics more than two decades ago, the Clintons have expended enormous energy protecting themselves from right-wing attack. The message of yesterday’s announcement video was that Hillary thinks that in the America of 2016, she no longer has to play that game.
