HRC is running a smart campaign

[Jim Lane]

12. If by "smart" you mean "finger expertly in the wind", then yes.

As even your excerpt makes clear, her campaign tack isn't based on principle. It's based on polling. On issues like marriage equality, she is "to the left" by the standards of past election years because the electorate is farther to the left than it's been in past election years.

She's doing a smart job of calculating what she can say to seem acceptable to progressives within the Democratic Party (so as to dissuade them from supporting a primary challenger from her left) while still "making her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year."

It's also smart (again in the limited sense of probability of electoral success) for her to avoid being specific about issues. For example, as even the discussions on DU reveal, there's no explicit position she could take about TPA/TPP that wouldn't tick off some of the voters she's trying to reach. If her principal goal were good public policy, she could wield some influence now by endorsing it or by opposing it. Instead, she can say that she's for good jobs and for American prosperity and against weakening our national security, and thus avoid saying anything that anyone might disagree with. It's a classic front-runner strategy.

I'll add a prediction: As part of her "smart" campaign, she'll do as little as possible to acknowledge her rivals. Unless the polls change dramatically, we'll see no equivalent of the "3:00 a.m. phone call" attack ad that she ran against Obama in 2008. She would probably prefer to have no debates at all (which was the course she elected in 2006 when she had a similar big lead against her progressive opponent in the Democratic primary). Unable to get away with that, she'll prefer having as few debates as possible, and the DNC seems poised to help her out by trying to limit the debates to six.