WASHINGTON -- The first debate of the Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday evening presents an opportunity for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to shore up her support among progressives and cement her status as the field’s front-runner. But a review of the primary debates Clinton participated in in 2007 and 2008, the last time she ran for president, illustrates the difficulties that come with being the leader of the pack.
Significantly more scrutiny was leveled on Clinton at the time, as her primary rivals piled on her record as first lady and as a senator from New York, accusing her of flip-flopping on issues.
The most frequent target was Clinton’s vote in 2002 authorizing the use of force in Iraq. She refused to say that the vote was a mistake, or that it was naive to trust President George W. Bush.
“Well, I have said repeatedly that if I had known then what I know now, I never would have voted to give the president authority,” she said during a debate in June 2007. “And in the last debate, I said that, you know, it was a mistake to trust George Bush that he would do what he told all of us he would do. … Now, I do not think that that is a necessarily wrong judgment at the time. What was wrong is the way this president misused the authority that some of us here gave him. And that has been a tragedy.”
If Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) highlights the vote Tuesday, as he is expected to, Clinton may offer a defense of her decision that is more in line with how she described the vote in Hard Choices, the memoir she released last year.
“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” she wrote. “And I wasn't alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.”
Trade is an area where Clinton could be vulnerable to charges of flip-flopping. She announced her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement last week, after having spoken favorably of the deal as secretary of state. She said recently that the TPP deal didn’t meet her standards.
In 2007, she refused to call the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband Bill Clinton signed, an outright mistake, even though she spoke critically of its effects on Americans.
“Look, NAFTA did not do what many had hoped,” she said. “And so we do need to take a look at it and we do need to figure out how we're going to have trade relations that are smart, that give the American worker and the American consumer rights around the world.”
“NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would, and that's why I call for trade timeout,” she added, when pressed. “When I am president, I'm going to evaluate every trade agreement. We do need to get back to enforcing the ones we have, which the Bush administration has not done. They have totally abdicated that.”
The moderators of Tuesday’s debate may ask Clinton about her views on how to keep Social Security solvent. Both former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sanders support lifting the cap on the amount of income that is taxable for Social Security, which is currently $118,500. Clinton has suggested that she would be open to lifting the cap this election cycle, but hasn’t said so definitely. In 2007, she refused to support lifting the cap of $97,500, and called President Barack Obama’s proposal to do so a tax increase that would hit middle-class earners.
During her last presidential campaign, Clinton's rivals also seized on her waffling on whether she thought undocumented immigrants should be able to obtain driver’s licenses. She said in 2007 that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to give the licenses to undocumented immigrants in the state made sense, but that she herself did not support the concept.
“Well, what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally. They are undocumented workers. They are driving on our roads. The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds. It's probability. So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum,” she said, when asked why the proposal was a logical one.
“I believe we need to get back to comprehensive immigration reform because no state, no matter how well-intentioned, can fill this gap,” she added. “There needs to be federal action on immigration reform.”
But the subsequent exchange put Clinton on the defense, as the debate’s moderator, Tim Russert, pressed her to reveal her actual position.
RUSSERT: Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure what I heard. Do you, the New York Senator Hillary Clinton, support the New York governor's plan to give illegal immigrants a driver's license? You told the Nashua, New Hampshire, paper it made a lot of sense.
SEN. CLINTON: It --
RUSSERT: Do you support his plan?
SEN. CLINTON: You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem. We have failed, and George Bush has failed.
Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? Remember, in New York we want to know who's in New York. We want people to come out of the shadows. He's making an honest effort to do it. We should have passed immigration reform.
In a debate later in the primary season, Clinton defended her opposition to providing driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants by suggesting the move would undermine the labor market for American citizens. She argued that undocumented immigrants would have to “pay a fine because you entered illegally, be willing to pay back taxes over time, try to learn English” before talking about “privileges” like a driver’s license.
“It's imperative we approach it this way, only after people have agreed to these conditions … and that they have been willing to say, yes, they will meet those conditions, do I think we ought to talk about privileges like drives' licenses,” she said.
Clinton said this year that she supports driver's licenses for those who are undocumented and that she would expand Obama's deportation relief policies, so her opponents may not feel it's worth it to dredge up the issue.
A theme Clinton looks likely to return to is that any policy disagreements between Democrats pale in comparison to the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans. She has focused her attacks on her Republican counterparts, rather than her Democratic opponents, on the campaign trail this cycle.
“The differences among us are minor,” she said in 2007. “The differences between us and the Republicans are major. And I don't want anybody in America to be confused.”
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