Monday on Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect,” co-hosts John Heilemann and Mark Halperin argreed Hillary Clinton’s “unbecoming” hard turn to the left on issues like trade are cynical political “calculations” to “cover her left flank.”
John Heilemann said, “You can see the calculation here. There is no doubt about it. She does not want anybody to get to her left. She wants to cover her left flank. And yet she wants to leave enough room to be in favor of this trade deal if it eventually gets signed. But that kind of calculation does not look good on Hillary Clinton, I don’t think, and when you hear Bernie Sanders say ‘what is the deal?’, we all have a position. You are for it or against it. Come on pick a side. I think that is a strong posture for Sanders to have. And it does makes her look like some of the more unattractive elements of Clintonian triangulation and fudging that we have seen from her in years past.”
Halperin said, “Clinton and her advisers believe the more she can fuzz up the more she can keep her left flank protected, the better and she is willing to take the hit from the press as what is universally seen, you saw it today with the questions in New Hampshire, as something unbecoming.”
Heilemann added, “I think both of us think, having lived through the first Clinton term, knowing what her husband’s economic philosophy is, knowing how much of a global guy he is and what she has always been, in her heart, she is pro-free trade, but that makes the hedging on this all the more, I think not damaging, but unbecoming, as you put it.”
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