Hillary Clinton has a Me-Too problem, and it was illustrated perfectly at last night’s Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia.
Here’s the problem. Clinton allows Barack Obama and John Edwards (and sometimes even Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd) to dictate the policy proposals of the Democratic field. By and large, she puts forward relatively moderate ideas that rely heavily on conventional thinking—until one or more of her competitors takes a more bold, populist stand. Then Clinton immediately embraces the new stand, and the competitor or competitors have nothing on which to run against her.
That doesn’t strike me as true leadership. And yesterday’s debate had a moment that illustrated this perfectly. Clinton was asked by Tim Russert if she supported New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. According to Russert, Clinton had told a group of newspaper editors that the idea made sense. Clinton responded approvingly, saying, “What Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.” Illegal immigrants are on the roads and will get into accidents. It’s a reality, she said, and we ought to have a system to handle it.
But then Chris Dodd criticized the idea, saying that a driver’s license is a privilege and not a right. Clinton instantly said, “I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done.” Dodd pounced: “Wait a minute. No, no, no. You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it.” Clinton responded by trying to explain that Spitzer’s plan included three different kind of licenses. She promptly got lost in the weeds and accused the assembled of playing “gotcha.” With that, it was off to the races.
And it wasn’t an isolated case. On multiple occasions throughout the night, when Clinton was the third or fourth respondent to a question, she would begin her response by saying something to the effect of, “I agree with everything that my colleagues have just said.” After she spent the night getting slammed on Iraq, Iran, and even on driver’s licenses, the best she could do was tell everyone she had the same position as everybody on everything.
Update: Transcript of the debate here. Note that Chris Dodd supports the decriminalization of marijuana and Dennis Kucinich admits that he believes he has seen a UFO. Courage points for both, I suppose.
Update Update: A little on why the Spitzer proposal makes sense over at DMI Blog.