DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS. You see these sorts of laundry lists laying out Hillary's progressivism fairly often, but they always strike me as making the case against her more forcefully than they make the case for her (the supporters, they doth protest too much). I mean, that's a technically impressive record, but it's decidedly in the center of the party. There's nothing on there that Obama or Edwards disagrees with, and I'd say they're more programmatically liberal than her on a good number of the issues -- particularly health care, where she's spent years explicitly embracing tepidity. Worse, there's often this caveat that Hillary is a women, and so you can write off her sustained hawkishness as a sop to America's misogynists. But the pressures on a woman to appear tough don't end when she enter office. They increase. So if Hillary is willing to buckle on issues like Iraq while in the United States Senate -- and to be clear, I don't think she buckled, I think she's a genuine hawk -- there's no reason to believe she'll act differently once elected. To my mind, there's a fairly strong "competence" argument in favor of electing Clinton. She has a deep and broad understanding of the executive branch, and will be able to hit the ground running. She's just not interested in running very fast. With Clinton, you have something close to an assurance that, domestically at least, she will pursue a series of useful and progressive small bore policies in a determined and sustained way -- and many of them will likely be enacted. Edwards seems more like a bet on the possibility of grand change -- with the attendant increased likelihood of real failure. And Obama strikes me as occupying something of a middle ground between careful, consensus-driven politics and transformative change. That doesn't get into the electability arguments, which I don't really have an opinion on. I think Hillary's a pretty skilled politician, and will do much better than many liberals currently believe. I think Obama has the greatest potential upside as an individual candidate, and I think Edwards has the greatest likelihood of running a campaign that helps mainstream progressivism. On the downside, a lot of people really hate Hillary and she'll energize the Right, Obama is an uneven politician who could really flameout, and Edwards has made a series of boneheaded, careless errors that speak poorly of his political discipline. So yeah, tough decisions to be made. But I just don't buy the argument that Hillary is even nearly as progressive as her two nearest competitors. This election is taking place in a context where all the candidates are actually quite progressive, so saying she's relatively less so is different than saying that she's conservative, but on everything from foreign policy to health care to cultural issues (like flag burning and video games), she's repeatedly demonstrated a broad centrist streak -- which is perfectly defensible, just not an orientation I share, or one that her supporters should ignore. --Ezra Klein
