Ryan Lizza: What Hillary makes of the Clinton legacy

... Whereas in 1999 and 2000 George W. Bush emphasized his independence from his father’s Administration, Hillary showed no hesitation in discussing the Clinton Presidency as a joint venture. Speaking of a recent address she gave on the credit-mortgage crisis, she told me, “We had the same kinds of events in ’92, in New Hampshire. And then, during the nineties, we didn’t have these problems. And it’s like déjà vu all over again. You know, here we are, with middle-class people worrying about whether they’re going to keep their homes, and afford their health care, and send their kid to college.” She spoke of her Presidency as an inevitability. “So, unfortunately, after making progress during the nineties on a lot of these bread-and-butter issues, I’m back to facing them again, and will have to deal with them as President.”

But she looks at Clintonism as if it were a buffet—she takes only the parts she likes. When I asked her about what has changed since the nineties, she mentioned being “older and wiser” and “the learning process” and how “we have to look at the world as it is now.” At a conference of liberal bloggers in Chicago last month, someone brought up four of Bill Clinton’s policies and asked Hillary if she would renounce her support for them: welfare reform, NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act (which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which weakened restrictions on media consolidation). She said that the positive aspects of welfare reform outweighed the negative; repudiated parts of the marriage act; distanced herself from NAFTA; and, on the telecom law, said, “You’ll have to ask Al Gore,” who championed it. Most pointedly, she has moved away from her husband’s pro-free-trade rhetoric, making it clear that Edwards’s attempts to distinguish himself will be difficult. “A trade policy without labor and environmental standards that are enforceable is just no longer feasible,” she told me. Asked if NAFTA, which Bill Clinton cites as one of his most significant achievements, was a mistake, she replied, matter-of-factly, “I think that NAFTA didn’t realize the benefits that were advertised.” She added, “Well, you know, you don’t remain static—you have to continue to evaluate what was and wasn’t done.” On the deficit, Hillary did not sound as hawkish as her husband. Is it necessary to get the deficit to zero? She wants it on a “declining trajectory,” she said, but quickly noted the importance of her health-care and energy plans.

When I brought up Edwards’s attacks on Clintonism as timid and tactical, she became more animated. She threw her head back and slapped the desk, clanking her watch on the surface. She rejected the idea that she is simply running for a third Clinton term, but she had a warning for an opponent who thinks he can defeat her by taking on her husband: “Any Democrat who rejects the only two-term Democratic President we’ve had since Franklin Roosevelt is rejecting an important part of how we are in a position to be able to run and win in the 2008 election. There was a lot of business taken care of in the nineties—you know, Democrats can be good stewards of the economy. In fact, given Bush and Cheney, better stewards than Republicans. Democrats don’t take a back seat to anybody on crime and national security. Democrats have the biggest expansion of health care, with the Children’s Health Insurance Program, since Lyndon Johnson. So why would we want to reject what we’ve accomplished? If I were not named Clinton, I would be saying, ‘Good for us!’ ” She paused and added, “But, you know, that was then. This is now.”