What Hillary Believes

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TIME Political Columnist Joe Klein talks with Sen. Hillary Clinton about what she really believes

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There is a larger problem with the conventional wisdom that Clinton has been too careful and calculating in this campaign. That charge is often expressed as a question about her "authenticity" — that foolish journalistic cliché meant to denote the appearance of informality and spontaneity. But authenticity is not the same as courage. You can fake authenticity. You can't fake courage. Clinton has always had a problem with authenticity. Her laugh, sometimes awkwardly manufactured for public use yet always delightfully raucous in private, is Exhibit A. But her plans on the big domestic-policy issues — health care and energy — have been courageous and detailed, more sophisticated than her opponents' — and very, very smart politically. Just before our interview, Clinton gave a speech launching her energy-independence proposal. It would drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by auctioning off permits to pollute and is similar to Obama's — but Obama has added a fillip of honesty by telling his audiences that the program might result in higher energy prices. I asked Clinton why she hadn't been similarly honest, and she immediately turned it around: Obama wanted to spend the proceeds of the pollution auction — perhaps as much as $50 billion — on alternative-energy research and development. "I have committed to putting money from that auction into programs to ... cushion the economic impact on working and poor families," she said. And then she added scornfully, "So if you want to go and get some debating point telling people this is going to cost you money, then I don't think you've thought through the policy as carefully as you could ... This is going to be a tough transition. It's got to be done politically. One of the ways to make it politically palatable is to rebut the Republican talking point that ... it's another huge tax increase on Americans. You know what? It isn't."

There is one area in which Clinton does seem to be fudging unduly for political purposes: foreign policy. Her vote supporting a Senate resolution to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization seems a case in which she took the vote to protect her flank from Republican attacks in the general election. It is a vote that especially rankles Democrats because the resolution was sponsored by the reviled neo-neoconservative apostate Joe Lieberman. Clinton told me she took the vote because she favors economic sanctions against Iran as an alternative to doing nothing, but it was a nonbinding, symbolic resolution that could be construed as supporting Bush in another foolish crusade. The economic sanctions will happen anyway. Clinton then pointed to other Senators — people like Jack Reed, Dick Durbin and Carl Levin — who had voted against the Iraq war and yet supported the resolution, but that's the sort of argument you make when you can't convincingly explain your own actions. My guess is that she's taking political cover on Iran. Clinton's actual foreign policy positions haven't been much different from Joe Biden's or Obama's. She is rhapsodic about the possibilities of diplomacy, and she has earned the trust of the military because of her hard work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Her refusal to be pinned down on her exact plans for leaving Iraq has been the subject of recent attacks by Edwards. But Edwards' proposal to immediately withdraw 50,000 troops from Iraq — without saying which troops, from what regions and what the remaining troops would do — demonstrates a careless political expediency on an issue that demands the utmost care.