When we speak of Hillary Clinton’s lack of a deft political touch, that generally brings to mind her awkward manner of public speaking. The former secretary of state’s transparent lack of authenticity is a liability that she has struggled with throughout her career in electoral politics. But sometimes it refers to the way her survival instincts point her in the wrong direction when a smarter politician, like the one she is married to, would understand that it is sometimes better to stay consistent and stand your ground than to flip-flop. But that’s just what Hillary did again on Wednesday when she announced that she is opposing President Obama’s trade bill.
The attack on the Trans-Pacific Partnership seems to make political sense because it aligns her with the Democratic Party’s left-wing base and the unions that hate anything that smacks of free trade. Doing so seemingly insulates her against attacks from Bernie Sanders and other left-wing rivals in advance of next week’s first Democratic presidential debate. But if that’s what Hillary and her handlers think, they’re dead wrong. This is political stupidity of the highest order. Far from closing off an avenue of attack on a point on which she is weak, it actually renders the Democratic frontrunner even more vulnerable because it allows opponents to remind voters of Clinton’s Achilles’ Heel: her chameleon-like approach to issues and her complete lack of political authenticity.
While the headlines about Clinton’s decision are centering on the fact that it shows she is distancing herself from the president, the person that she’s really running away from is herself. Let’s recall that this is the same trade bill that Clinton endorsed in 2012. As the New York Times helpfully noted:
In a 2012 speech in Australia, Mrs. Clinton had said the trade pact, which would bring together the economies of countries from Chile to Canada to Japan, “sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open, free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.”
But while that reversal is damning, her new stand condemning the treaty as not meeting the “high bar” she sets for trade bills is also contradicted by her comments about the issue in, Hard Choices, her comically titled memoir of her time as Secretary of State. As Politico reports, in the 2014 book Clinton says the deal would be, “important for American workers, who would benefit from competing on a more level playing field. And it was a strategic initiative that would strengthen the position of the United States in Asia.” She balanced that with weasel words about reserving judgment about the final text, but that just highlights her hypocrisy because the finished product is actually far more favorable to the interests of the unions (and therefore has alienated some Republicans who might otherwise be expected to support a trade deal) than the treaty she wholeheartedly endorsed in 2012.
To some in her camp, her decision is smart because they correctly note that the only people whose vote will be affected by the issue are left-wingers and union activists who want to kill the treaty. But what they are forgetting is that Hillary is playing for higher stakes than a few union votes. For all of the power of the left among Democrats, Hillary’s real problem isn’t whether Elizabeth Warren thinks she is a pure enough liberal. It’s the fact that voters, including many Democrats, have correctly pegged the former First Lady as a cynical political phony.
If Bernie Sanders is threatening Clinton’s supposedly inevitable march to her party’s nomination, it is not because Democrats are ready for socialism. It’s because they understand that he is sincere and principled (albeit sincerely dedicated to terribly wrong ideas about economics, the size of government, and foreign policy), and she is as authentic as a three-dollar bill. Even if the odds still favor her even if Vice President Joe Biden eventually jumps into the race, if there is any chance of her losing the nomination, it is because being stacked up against conviction politicians like Biden and Sanders exposes her greatest weakness.
This is, after all, the same candidate that a word cloud produced by a recent Quinnipiac poll showed that the terms most associated with Clinton in the public’s mind are: “liar,” “untrustworthy” and “dishonest.” Many observers think this will hurt her more in a general election than in the Democratic primaries. But as much as most Democrats are conditioned to think of issues like her email scandal or Benghazi as GOP attack memes, many in her own party are just as sick of her lies, backtracking, and flip-flopping on the issues as is anyone on the right. While a stand in favor of the trade agreement would have alienated some liberals and the unions, her shameless and transparently political decision to turn her coat on the issue only reinforces her image as a political shape-shifter.
Rather than easing her path to victory or to a successful debate, the Clinton flip-flop just gave her opponents more damaging talking points. She may be trying hard to embrace a Democratic left that doesn’t trust her, but the person she is really running against is Hillary Clinton. While she may be able to beat Sanders, she’s losing badly to herself, and everyone knows it.
