Hillary's Common Ground

The adjective Clintonian, as in, slippery, is seeming more and more these days to apply not only to President Clinton but to the senator who wants to follow her husband into the White House. Mrs. Clinton has managed in recent weeks to take both sides on the question of whether illegal immigrants should have driver's licenses. Rather than learning from that mistake, in the most recent debate she also spoke out of both sides of her mouth when it came to the question of Republicans. At the beginning of the debate, she described Republicans as "the people who [sic] we're against." Later in the debate, she claimed she was an expert at reaching out to Republicans.

She started out by saying, "The people who we're against are not going to be giving up without a fight. The Republicans are not going to vacate the White House voluntarily." Then, in response to a question about whether she is too polarizing, she replied, "When I started running for the Senate in New York, I heard the same things. And what I did was to reach out to Republicans, Democrats, independents, rural, urban. Because we've got to begin to work together. That's what I've tried to do in the Senate, working across party lines, trying to find common ground." She went on, "That's the kind of president I will be. I will spend a lot of my time working with not just Republicans, but people who aren't in public life."

Here's a hint for Mrs. Clinton. If you want to reach out and find common ground, the best way to start isn't by defining Republicans as "the people who we're against." It's off-putting, and it suggests the desire to reach out is less than entirely sincere. The two-facedness is likely to hurt Mrs. Clinton not only with Republicans and independents but with partisan Democratic loyalists. It's hard to tell which is the real Senator Clinton, the one who thinks Republicans are the enemy or the one who wants to reach out to them. It's the sort of episode that lends credence to those who say Mrs. Clinton doesn't really have many core beliefs, but will do or say whatever it takes to get elected.