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Hillary Clintons campaign rollout so far has taken many people by surprise. All the silly folderol about emails and her unwillingness to talk to the press aside, what seems to have many reeling is the list of rather shockingly liberal agenda items shes announced and the decidedly populist approach shes taken to solving them. Apparently most observers thought she would run as if it were 1992 and the long-disbanded Democratic Leadership Council was in its heyday. But you have to admit that even by comparison to her run in 2008, she it taking a much more aggressively progressive stance on a number of issues from immigration to criminal justice reform to voting rights that just a short while ago would have been seen to be dangerous ground for a Democratic candidate for president.

For decades Democrats tried to finesse thorny racial issues (which is what many of those issues named above subconsciously relate to) while still being seen as the party friendly to racial minorities. It hasnt bought them a white Southern vote in a national election in decades. It was always a fools errand but it took the victory of an African American president to finally show the party how to win without them.

And Clinton, not being a fool, can see that quite clearly as well. But she doesnt seem to arrogantly believe that the coalition that elected President Obama twice should be taken for granted and good for her. It shouldnt be and if the Democratic party expects to win presidential elections it has an obligation to put the needs of those voters above the prejudices of voters who will never vote for them anyway. Its hard to believe they ever thought that was a winning strategy in the first place.

But its still amusing for some of us who lived through the Clinton administration years to see people blinking in amazement that Hillary Clinton would be running for president on what looks so far to be a pretty liberal platform. After all, in the 90s it was widely believed that she was the evil Rasputin whispering Marxist feminist theory in poor Bills ear every night. Her liberal feminist image in Arkansas had been a subject of endless gossip and criticism for years but conservative columnist Paul Gigot in the Wall Street Journalgot the ball rollingin the national press when he dredged up some of her early academic work and famously called her an ardent liberal and feminist in the spring of 1992. The social conservatives went nuts, with Christian Right leaders like Gary Bauerclaimingthat Clinton had a radical philosophy that would rip the heart out of any family. At the Republican ConventionPat Buchanan famously roared:

Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents. And Hillary has compared marriage and the family, as institutions, to slavery and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends Friends, this This, my friends This is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America: abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units. Thats change, all right. But thats not the kind of change America needs. Its not the kind of change America wants. And its not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call Gods country.

There have been many books and articles written about all this so theres no need to rehash it all now. Suffice to say it was probably a lot more complicated than any of that and so is Hillary Clinton. In the intervening years her image morphed into one of a centrist largely, I believe, on the basis of her monumental error in voting for the Iraq war. (According to the Poole and RosenthalDW-Nominate analysisher Senate record placed her at 11th most liberal out of a hundred. Joe Biden, by comparison was number 33 and Bernie Sanders No. 1 in the same period.) Its probably enough to simply say that Clinton is a mainstream Democrat and leave it at that. People will decide whether or not thats sufficient when they go to the voting booth.

It is, nonetheless, interesting to ponder why so many liberals are convinced that the person who was once seen as a hard core liberal feminist is now widely assumed to be a middle-of-the-road centrist. Brian Beutler tackled this subject last week inthis piece at The New Republicwhere he posits that its because of Bill Clintons reputation for a political tactic called triangulation rather than any specific ideological issues. He wrote:

For the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clintons presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in ones own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political partys policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

One big concern bedeviling progressives is that Hillary Clintons candidacy will mark the return of triangulationthe preemptive ceding of ideological turf, at a time when, thanks to partisan polarization, such concessions amount to outright victories for the Republican Party.

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