James Kirchick

Hillary’s left turn

The Democratic party has moved left under Obama. It’s not a look that suits the former first lady

The centrist Democratic party bequeathed to President Barack Obama by Bill Clinton is not the one he will leave to his successor. By every measure, it is more left-wing, and more populist both in spirit and ideological composition. And this poses serious problems for the campaign of the candidate seen as America’s most likely next president: Hillary Clinton. That she knows it’s a problem is obvious from the way her campaign has begun. ‘Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion,’ she declared in a video released last weekend. Almost a year ago, launching the memoir of her time as Secretary of State, Clinton had begun testing populist themes. The nation, she said at the time, must ‘deal with the cancer of inequality’.

A few days earlier, she had warned that the country faced a new ‘Gilded Age of the robber barons’. Clinton must mouth these platitudes because the mood in America, at least on the left, has changed since she and her husband occupied the White House. The robust liberal internationalism that bombed Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, along with the business-friendly policies of the New Democrat movement (inspiration for New Labour) are a shadow of their former selves. The Democratic Leadership Council, the think-tank that helped to create the New Democrats, shut its doors in 2011. In fashion today, thanks largely to Obama’s influence, is American foreign policy retrenchment and fire-and-brim stone speeches attacking the rich. Unlike her husband, who grew up in a trailer park and had an incomparable human touch, Hillary Clinton does not make a convincing populist. Since leaving the State Department three years ago, she traipsed around the country and the world racking up speaking fees of $200,000 an event.

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