Back in 2008, I tried (without much success) to convince everyone that John McCain's reputation as a "maverick" was built on a fundamental misconception. It isn't that he didn't sometimes go against the prevailing Republican position on a given issue, because he did, even if those occasions were actually quite rare. It's that when he did so, it was always on an issue where the Republican position was vastly unpopular with the public as a whole. So his maverickizing inevitably put him on the right side of public opinion, winning him the best of both worlds: He could win plaudits from his admirers in the press for being allegedly courageous, but also do the popular thing.
I thought of that today looking at Hillary Clinton, who last night made her first detailed remarks on immigration since becoming a candidate-not because I'm trying to argue that Clinton is as phony as McCain (maybe, maybe not, but not what I'm interested in right now), but because of the complex interplay of sincere belief, primary considerations, and general election worries that operates on an issue like this one. While it was expected that Clinton would be firmly in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, her comments yesterday were surprising because they put her to the left of Barack Obama. Not only does she support the executive actions he has taken on immigration, she said she'd go further, by moving to suspend deportations of the parents of "dreamers," undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. (Obama's policy covers undocumented immigrant parents of those who were born in the U.S., but not the parents of those who came here as children.)
There's a long way to go in this campaign, but it looks so far like Clinton is emerging as a more liberal candidate than we expected, particularly given that, for most of her career, she's been known as a center-left Democrat. I think Steve Benen describes the situation well:
But as her candidacy takes shape, note how consistently she's positioned herself as a progressive champion of late. Clinton delighted much of the left, for example, with her remarks on criminal-justice reform last week. The Democratic base was equally pleased to hear about Clinton's 50-state strategy, her willingness to buck Wall Street, and her consideration of a constitutional amendment on campaign financing.
And now Clinton has done it again on immigration.
Some critics on the left will likely note, with cause, that she's adopted a far more progressive vision than the one she used to espouse. There's some truth to that, though where she is arguably matters more than where she was. President Obama has helped shift the national debate to the left a bit on many of these key issues; the Democratic coalition has become more unified around a progressive agenda; much of the American mainstream is far more likely to embrace the left's proposals than it was eight years ago; and Clinton has clearly evolved on these issues, ending up right where most of her party-and much of her country -want her to be.
As I've argued before, ultimately irrelevant is the question of whether Clinton is sincere on any particular issue on which her position has changed; presidents govern as the candidates they were, whatever might be in their hearts. And I have no trouble believing that she genuinely believes in what she's espousing now. It's not as though she underwent some kind of wholesale, Romney-esque reinvention; in some cases she's just putting a new emphasis on things she already believed, and in others (like marriage equality) she evolved along with most of the country. Furthermore, issues themselves change over time, and often there is a different set of options on the table now than there were ten or twenty years ago. And there are certainly issues we haven't yet gotten into where her more centrist impulses might come to the fore. She hasn't said a lot about foreign policy yet, and she has always been one of the more hawkish Democrats.
Clinton has no such fears. Although public opinion on immigration is complicated, there's a clear majority in favor of a path to citizenship, and the people who would be most angered by what she said yesterday aren't going to be voting Democratic anyway. So she can simultaneously cheer her base, assure Hispanic voters, and risk nothing with white moderates.
That's true to varying degrees on many other issues as well, for the simple reason that in most (not all, but most) cases, the consensus position within the Democratic Party is more popular than the consensus position within the Republican Party. It's a nice place for Clinton to be.
