Hillary: Love Her, Hate Her

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As Hillary has worked to take the partisan edge off her image, she has also underscored the biggest question voters have about her: What does she really believe in? A First Lady can pick and choose her issues, but as a Senator, Hillary has been forced to take stands in areas that go far beyond the health-care and family issues that Americans have long associated with her. Her voting pattern has tilted liberal, but in National Journal's ratings of the five Democratic Senators most often mentioned as presidential contenders, Hillary's record (more liberal than 80.5% of her Senate colleagues', in a computer analysis of key votes) comes down in the middle--less liberal than Kerry (85.7%) but more so than Delaware's Joe Biden (76.8%) and Indiana's Evan Bayh (63.2%).

Some of her positions have been surprising--although not as inconsistent as her critics say. After she called abortion a "sad, even tragic choice" in a January 2005 speech, pundits said she was remaking herself for a presidential race, and liberal groups raised cries of alarm. But in fact, Hillary had made similar comments often in the past. Aides from the 1992 campaign say she helped come up with Bill's signature line that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."

Whatever she does is held up not only to her own record but also to Bill's. Given the battles he fought to bring his party around to the benefits of globalization, it seemed a repudiation for her to oppose the Bush Administration-- approved deal to turn over operations of some U.S. ports to a Dubai-owned company. Never mind that virtually every other Democrat and Republican on Capitol Hill was right where she was in demagoguing as a national-security threat a deal that would have very little impact, if any, on how the ports would be run. And it didn't help her credibility when the Financial Times revealed that the emirate--where Bill had been paid $450,000 in speaking fees in 2002--was getting advice from her husband on how to go forward with the deal even as she was trying to derail it. His aides said that he was not paid for the advice and that he merely told the company it should submit to additional government review. The deal was later scuttled.

Even when Bill doesn't get in her way, Hillary has trouble pulling off what came so naturally to him. "I wish she hadn't come out against flag burning," says her supporter and funder Rapoport. "The worst mistake she can make is to move to the right. She's going to lose a lot of the enthusiasm of the people who can get her elected." But others point out that by supporting a statute banning flag burning, she helped defeat a more drastic constitutional amendment that would have done the same thing--very much like what her husband did in 1995 when he produced a balanced budget, horrifying the left with 25% cuts in domestic spending. That helped take the political momentum out of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. "Do you pretend [an issue] doesn't exist, or do you find a way to beat it?" asks former Clinton White House domestic-policy director Bruce Reed. "The Clintons have always found a way to beat it."