What Hillary Believes

A few days after her roughest night as a candidate — the Oct. 30 Democratic presidential debate — Hillary Clinton could be found ambling along a spectacular bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in a town called Clinton, Iowa, with former Vice President Walter Mondale, a ghost of Democratic disasters past. It was the photo op for an endorsement that seemed a potential kiss of death. Mondale is a smart and decent man, but he ran the worst sort of cautious front-runner campaign for the nomination in 1984, was nearly upended by the younger, more dynamic Gary Hart in the primaries and was utterly trounced by Ronald Reagan in the general election, in part because, in an untypically incautious moment in his acceptance speech for the nomination, he said he would raise taxes.

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

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Clinton has been accused of running a cautious front-runner campaign. She is challenged by a pair of dynamic younger candidates in Barack Obama and John Edwards. She has endorsed higher taxes for the wealthy. And more than a few Democrats worry that she cannot win a general election, even against a disgraced and exhausted Republican Party. In other ways, however, Clinton is the furthest thing from Mondale imaginable. A vote for Clinton is, at bottom, a radical proposition. It is a vote for the first woman to run for President, the most dramatic expansion of American possibility since a Catholic was elected President in 1960. In the past six months, Clinton has transformed herself into a far more dynamic campaigner than Mondale ever was. But most important, there is a stark difference in political philosophy between them: Clinton is a pragmatic moderate, and Mondale was an old-fashioned liberal. Bill Clinton rode to the presidency as the champion of an organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, that was founded as a direct reaction against Mondale's disastrous campaign. Indeed, a few minutes after the photo op, Senator Clinton offered the clearest statement of her own — and her husband's — philosophy that I've ever heard. It came during a brisk question-and-answer session with local residents. A retired dairy farmer complained about the deregulation of his industry and asked what she'd do about it. "During this campaign, you're going to hear me talk a lot about the importance of balance," she began, after acknowledging that the Bush Administration had gone too far toward deregulation in most areas. "You know, our politics can get a little imbalanced sometimes. We move off to the left or off to the right, but eventually we find our way back to the center because Americans are problem solvers. We are not ideologues. Most people are just looking for sensible, commonsense solutions."

It was classic Clinton. And having watched both Clintons for nearly 20 years now, I believe it is an honest summation of what they think they're about: "Getting stuff done," as Bill Clinton used to say. That means being flagrantly political, working the system, making the compromises necessary to get the best deal possible to enact their priorities. It is the domestic-policy equivalent of Realpolitik, and it drives partisans crazy on both sides of the political divide. Conservatives go ballistic because they don't see Hillary Clinton as a moderate at all — she's a tax-raising, socialized-health-care-loving peacenik feminazi. She and her husband steal conservative memes and tropes to hoodwink the masses. During the political nuclear winter of the 1990s, Yale professor Stephen Skowronek opined that Bill Clinton was the sort of President who inspires a special frenzy in his opponents — Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon were others — because he takes the more accessible parts of their agendas and adopts them. Hillary Clinton inspired an even greater frenzy because she was a gender revolutionary, transforming the cotton-candy role of First Lady into a power position. She wasn't nearly as charming as her husband either. And she seemed ... tougher.

But Senator Clinton has trouble on the left as well, especially in a Democratic primary. The Clintons were always perceived, especially by the populist labor left, as Wall Street fellow travelers on issues like free trade and fiscal conservatism. They were seen as ideological trimmers, betraying the interests of the working class. These days, after seven years of Bush extremism, there is a fury in the Democratic base, an impatience with compromise — with The Politics of Parsing, as Edwards put it in a devastating webcast about Clinton's performance in the Oct. 30 debate. And so, when Hillary Clinton and I sat down for a chat the day after the Mondale endorsement, I asked her about political balance. Most members of her party would agree that George W. Bush had taken the nation wildly off-kilter to the right, but when had the government been imbalanced to the left? "One would argue that welfare reform was to a great extent a reaction to going off too far in one direction," she said carefully, acknowledging the success of her husband's 1996 initiative — although, according to some historical accounts, she had reservations about it at the time. But she quickly moved back to the Bush presidency. "You don't usually talk about political philosophy" in a political campaign, she said, but the public understands that Bush's stampede to the right "is exactly what is wrong today ... And it has been a dangerous experiment, in my view."