Much has already been said about Hillary Clinton’s shifting positions on Iraq. Having once criticized President Bush for not sending enough troops, she now has announced her intent to vote to block war funding. But Hillary’s zigzagging is nothing new. It has been the stamp of her last fifteen years.

She began her political life in the radical student movement of the 1960’s, summarized by her commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1969, in which she declared that the “prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life . . . is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living.” (Husband Bill seems to have taken this quest to heart.)

Her New Leftism was not soon outgrown. In 1987, her profile raised by Bill’s status as governor of Arkansas, she assumed the chairmanship of the New World Foundation, a funder of radical Left, pro-Communist, and PLO-linked causes. The foundation had a history of such activities before Hillary took it over, but as I showed in a 1993 article for COMMENTARY, the number of extremist and Communist front groups funded by the foundation multiplied under her leadership.

In 1992, Bill ran for President as a “new Democrat,” code for not-a-liberal, and his emissaries successfully wooed my support. In discussions with leaders of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, I was assured that Hillary, far from tugging Bill leftward, was using her weight to keep the campaign in the middle of the road.

Not long after she and Bill moved into the White House, Hillary turned back to the Left, leading the effort to install some form of national health insurance and inviting Michael Lerner, the unreconstructed 1960’s radical then parading as a “rabbi,” to the White House to give her guidance. Hillary embraced Lerner’s Oz-like “politics of meaning,” even using the phrase in her speeches.

When she set up shop in New York and ran for the Senate, Hillary swung back toward the center, becoming an especially vocal supporter of Israel and, later, a hawk on Iraq. Now she has shed her hawk’s plumage for the white of a dove. All of which leaves us to ponder this question as she runs for President: would it be worse to be governed by Hillary the opportunist or Hillary the true believer?