![\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AHillary_Clinton_official_Secretary_of_State_portrait_crop.jpg;](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2016\/08\/Hillary_Clinton_official_Secretary_of_State_portrait_crop.jpg\")
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Three choices.<\/p>\n
As background, after the\u00a0observations on Clinton\u2019s speech that I wrote up on Friday morning<\/a>, I thought I had a great idea for a post. \u00a0I would take her platform, as found on her campaign website, and see what offered \u201ctriangulationability\u201d or even was more moderate than she gets credit for in the first place. \u00a0I didn\u2019t get very far, as it was slim pickin\u2019s.<\/p>\n Abortion? \u00a0She and her party and the abortion rights movement to which it feels it must conform, have become more radical: \u00a0with a promise to repeal the Hyde Amendment that prohibits government funding of abortion, and with liberal hand-wringing that Tim Kaine calls himself \u201cpersonally opposed,\u201d which is contrary to the current line that abortion is a positive good to be celebrated.<\/p>\n Government spending? \u00a0Extensive promises of new government programs (free college, free preschool, parental leave, enhanced Social Security, increased spending on schools, etc.) to be paid for by the trio of the rich, Wall Street, and corporations (with, at the same time, promises of tax breaks for favored companies) or imagined to be \u201cpaying for themselves,\u201d e.g., the notion that infrastructure \u201cinvestements\u201d\/spending will grow the economy to a sufficient degree as to pay for themselves in added tax revenue.<\/p>\n Immigration? \u00a0A \u201creform\u201d that means, seemingly exclusively, legalization for everyone, and promises to expand executive amnesty, and deport only those who \u201cpose a violent threat to society\u201d in the meantime.<\/p>\n With respect to foreign policy and military spending? \u00a0Maybe. \u00a0She says<\/a>, \u201cWe should maintain the best-trained, best-equipped, and strongest military the world has ever known.\u201d \u00a0But her actual bullet points are to \u201ccreate budgetary certainty\u201d and \u201ccreate a defense budget that reflects good stewardship of taxpayer dollars,\u201d which are not reassuring to defense hawks.<\/p>\n And traditionally conservative concerns that make for easy \u201ccrossover\u201d support? \u00a0How hard would it be to cast her spending proposals as \u201cconservative\u201d by saying that she\u2019d reform welfare so that there are no \u201cmarriage penalties\u201d in the system? \u00a0There\u2019s also not even a nod to budget deficits anywhere in her \u201cissues.\u201d \u00a0And it was stunning that, in her speech, what\u00a0she claimed would be the centerpiece of bipartisan cooperation was a massive government spending program. \u00a0(See my Friday post link, above.)<\/p>\n As Ross Douthat observed<\/a>, she is not making an effort to reach out to moderates, and<\/p>\n . . . the absence of outreach is still notable, especially in a campaign that the Democrats are casting as a kind of national emergency.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t accuse them of putting party ahead of country \u2014 the party that nominated Donald Trump has cornered the market on that sin.<\/p>\n But strategically there are risks. The Clinton campaign needs to expand on the Obama coalition somewhere to make up for its likely losses among working-class white men. But it\u2019s assuming that it can afford to be more left-wing than Obama while doing so, relying on the fear that Trump instills rather than any ideological inducements to bring some Romney voters inside its tent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And over at Marginal Revolution<\/a>, Tyler Cowen writes,<\/p>\n if you agree that defeating Trump is a national emergency, do you also think the Democrats should be compromising more on actual policies?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So back to my three possible answers to the question in my post title.<\/p>\n Choice #1:<\/strong> \u00a0She doesn\u2019t want to moderate her positions. \u00a0To be sure, Bernie Sanders forced her into ever more generous promises, such as the continued increases in generosity of the promise for free college, but she\u2019s always preferred a very generous welfare state and is probably a bit relieved to have needed to take the mask off, and no longer play the role of pragmatist.<\/p>\n Consider, too, that this year to a degree greater than prior years, the Democratic message (and, admittedly, not just theirs) is that Donald Trump is bad, bad, bad, so much so that to vote for him is not just imprudent, but immoral. \u00a0And once you come to believe that a certain choice would be immoral, then you\u2019re much more likely to believe that there should be no \u201cnegotiating\u201d to try to dissuade the individual from making that choice, because that person (or those voters) shouldn\u2019t need incentives not to do something immoral.<\/p>\n Choice #2: \u00a0<\/strong>She doesn\u2019t need to triangulate. \u00a0Or, at least, she judges that she\u2019ll get the votes of disenchanted Republicans no matter what \u2014 or that, at a minimum, those voters won\u2019t vote for Trump, which is good enough. \u00a0And if you think you hold all the cards, you\u2019re not going to negotiate, but simply wait for your negotiating partner to give in.<\/p>\n Now, to be sure, Cowen (who borrowed and credited the line to a William Easterly tweet<\/a>) is taking the Glenn Reynolds approach. \u00a0Reynolds, readers may recognize, is the one who says, whenever a celebrity environmentalist spends ostentatiously on an enormous house or flies in a private jet, or whenever an environmentalist NGO gathers in a tropical location by private jet, links to the report with the line, \u201cI\u2019ll believe it\u2019s a crisis when the people who tell me it\u2019s a crisis act like it\u2019s a crisis.<\/a>\u201d \u00a0Here, too, Douthat and Cowen both argue that if there is a \u201ccrisis\u201d \u2014 a risk of an unsound man being elected \u2014 rather than just routine politics, then Clinton ought to be willing to compromise her cherished policy dreams in order to avoid that crisis.<\/p>\n Choice #3:<\/strong> \u00a0She can\u2019t triangulate without leftist voters staying home. \u00a0Look at the comments to the Douthat article. \u00a0When I read them last night, I had the impression of a\u00a0general tone that Douthat has no business suggesting that Clinton moderate her positions, because they are true and right and anything less would be a betrayal of her supporters. \u00a0And, of course, at the convention, Sanders supporters were hardly willing to fall in line, with protests both inside and outside of the convention hall. \u00a0Presumably polling could have revealed that any concessions or attempts to speak to moderates would come at the cost of Sanders voters.<\/p>\n The answer, of course, is all of the above.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AHillary_Clinton_official_Secretary_of_State_portrait_crop.jpg; By United States Department of State (Official Photo at Department of State page) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three choices. She doesn\u2019t want to. She doesn\u2019t need to. She isn\u2019t able to. As background, after the\u00a0observations on Clinton\u2019s speech that I wrote up on Friday morning, I thought I had a great idea for a post. \u00a0I would take her platform, as found on her campaign website, and see what offered \u201ctriangulationability\u201d or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":4968,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374],"tags":[229],"class_list":["post-4964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-hillary-clinton"],"yoast_head":"\n