HRC is running a smart campaign

[Jim Lane]

15. Two specific examples are in your own OP

She is taking "positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge." Both of those are issues where the electorate is to the left of where it was in past elections.

As for trade agreements, yes, she is as you say "against BS trade agreements" but she's for the trade agreements that are good for the United States. So where does she stand on the specific example I mentioned, TPP, and the related fast-track bill (TPA) now before Congress?

You say people aren't paying attention. I was paying attention when she described TPP as the "gold standard" of trade agreements. I would also love to be paying attention to her press conference or even her tweet where she says "I urge the House of Representatives to ________ the TPA bill", where the blank is completed with "approve" or "reject".

What she's doing instead is, as I said, the classic front-runner strategy of vagueness. If you don't like TPP, she has "a long record of being against BS trade agreements." If you like TPP, she was Secretary of State during much of the negotiating process and knew enough about the deal to describe it as "the gold standard". Ah, but, if you don't like TPP, well that "gold standard" quotation was from before the agreement was finalized, so she's not clearly committed to supporting TPP in its final form. Until she expressly supports or opposes the TPA that's now before Congress, she's trying to work both sides of the street.