Clearly scheduled by the party establishment to minimize their impact, the function of these debates isn’t to give Democratic primary voters (and non-Democrats interested in the country’s future) a sense of the range and depth of different candidates’s views and policies. The function is to provide Hillary Clinton the opportunity to workshop her candidacy, pretend to earn the nomination, reverse her high negative ratings, and finalize the exact compass points of her triangulation strategy in the general election. . . .
Clinton was staunchly against gay marriage until it became clear such a position was untenable in today’s America, thus completing the one conversion even more obviously political than Barack Obama’s switch in the heat of the 2012 election season. A one-time free trader whose president husband sealed the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Clinton recently trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership after having lobbied for its passage as secretary of state. It’s odd as hell that it took her so long to come up with a position on the Keystone XL pipeline, isn’t it? Only if you think she has an uncalculated bone in her body. Once upon a time (in 1996’s It Takes a Village), Clinton supported charter schools and the concept of parental choice. Sensing the need to wrap up support from teachers unions, she singing a different tune these days.
Never slow to attack illegal immigrants (and even deny them driver’s licenses) in the past, she now embraces full amnesty as the Republican Party has gone full into full-restrictionist mode. A strong supporter of TARP and bailing out Wall Street, she nows chants “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes” when asked about letting banks fail. For the most part, she is trying to disown her record as a relentless military interventionist while fudging negligible differences with Obama’s foreign policy.
A recipe for success!