Hillary, the Bran-Muffin Candidate

By Joe Klein

Hillary Clinton looked awful. Her eyes were bleary and puffy, as if she had stayed up all night or was in the midst of a fairly dramatic allergic reaction. (Her staff later said it was indeed allergies.) But there she was, on a Sunday morning in Miami, being Hillary!--as her campaign signs say--in what was billed as una charla (a chat) in front of about a thousand Latinos at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group. "Let's just talk like two girlfriends," she instructed her interviewer, a Latina newspaper publisher.

Yeah, right. Actually, I can easily imagine Senator Clinton chatting away with pals about the need for "cross-border cooperation on economic development with Mexico." She's a drop-dead policy wonk. And she's never going to be a warm, cuddly public person. She attacks her job like an assembly-line spot-welding robot, hitting each and every talking point precisely, even when she's rusty with allergies. And that, ultimately, is what she brings to this campaign: reliability, as opposed to experience. She has never been an executive decision maker, but she is solid as granite and righteous as a bran muffin. She isn't going to go all crazy or extreme on us, which is a relief after George W. Bush. She is, for the moment, the default position in the Democratic race.

Her most serious opponent, Senator Barack Obama, spoke to La Raza directly after Clinton, and he gave a gorgeous speech, using as his text a message that Martin Luther King Jr. had sent to Cesar Chavez in the midst of the farmworker activist's famous 1968 hunger strike: "Our separate struggles are really one." I hadn't seen Obama speak in several months, and his delivery had become more passionate, less cerebral. The substance of his message--on issues like immigration reform--was essentially the same as Clinton's. But he was more artful, using King and Chavez to draw together two ethnic groups, blacks and Latinos, that have a testy relationship in urban America. "Not only are our struggles one," he concluded, "but our dreams are too."

The crowd was wooed but not quite won. "My heart is with Obama, but my brain is with Hillary," said Lourdes Diaz of Miami. "I want to be able to vote for him, but I just don't know yet." Which pretty much sums up the state of the Democratic presidential race in midsummer. It is weirdly static. In most presidential campaigns I've covered, someone has made a dramatic move one way or another by now--Howard Dean's upward whoosh in 2004, for example. "Yeah, and then I had that downward whoosh," Dean told me recently, laughing. "This race isn't moving because it's still way early." True enough, but what about the volatility on the Republican side--John McCain's crash, the sudden, inexplicable loft of Fred Thompson's noncandidacy?

Hillary Clinton could easily have been the Democratic McCain, a political idea whose sell-by date had passed. She still may be. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are not dynasts by nature; there is real discomfort among the faithful, with the exception of working-class women, about bringing back the Clintons. And there is suspicion, among the party's fervent antiwarriors, that Clinton remains a hawk in dove's coo. But unlike McCain, who offended his party's base on immigration and undermined his reputation for fiscal responsibility by allowing his campaign's finances to crater, Clinton has proceeded with Hillarian equilibrium, carefully calibrating everything. Never saying too much--or very much at all. She still hasn't provided details of her promised universal health-insurance plan, and that may be wise. The public hasn't tuned in yet.

The day after her La Raza experience, Clinton was looking a lot better at the CNN/YouTube debate in Charleston, S.C., and she seemed to be feeling her oats as well. Three times she told the audience things it didn't want to hear, and in each case she clearly had the general electorate in mind rather than the Democratic base. She insisted that the withdrawal from Iraq would have to be gradual. She refused to say she would commit U.S. ground troops to Darfur. And then, after Obama promised he would meet with the leaders of countries like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba in his first year in office, she just leveled the guy. "I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries," she said, explaining that you need to do the diplomatic groundwork first, find out what their intentions are. "I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes."

Afterward various heart-driven focus groups said Obama had "won" the debate, but Clinton's moment was telling. It showed a nimble, lethal political intelligence, a quality she has rarely displayed in public before, and a firm grasp of how a smart President operates. Her fate remains at the mercy of Obama's ability to grow, but like any good bran muffin, she is showing some real high-fiber content.