Senator Hillary Clinton a “moderate”? However far to the left must you be to see Hillary Clinton as a moderate is where the mind of AP Washington bureau reporter Shannon McCaffrey resides. “Hillary Clinton Emerges as Moderate” announced the headline over McCaffrey's July 28 dispatch to which several CyberAlert readers alerted me.
The headline matched the text McCaffrey penned. She argued that Clinton has “belied” predictions that she would be “a liberal's liberal.” McCaffrey's evidence: Clinton was scheduled to deliver “the keynote address at a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in New York” and the organization is a “centrist group.”
But Senator John Kerry belongs to the group and Senator Tom Daschle spoke to the gathering. Does that make them moderates too?
McCaffrey soon contradicted herself as she reported that “Clinton now receives high marks from liberal groups,” such as 95 percent approval from Americans for Democratic Action for her 2001 Senate votes.
Still, “far from aligning herself with Kennedy, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone and the other members of the party's liberal wing,” McCaffrey contended, “Clinton has cast herself as a New Democrat on some key issues.” McCaffrey pointed to some slight deviations from the hard-core liberal line on bankruptcy, welfare work requirements and the marketing of sex and violence to children.
But after Senator Jesse Helms emerged as a champion of Third World debt forgiveness I don't recall any AP headline similar to: “Jesse Helms Transforms Self Into a Moderate.”
Not until the 16th paragraph did McCaffrey allow a conservative to suggest that maybe Clinton is changing her public positions on a few topics just to re-make her image for a presidential run.
Showing how truly clueless McCaffrey is to where politicians are on the left-right spectrum, she referred to former California Rep. Vic Fazio as “a pioneer in pulling Democrats toward the center.”
But as former MRCer Tim Graham pointed out to me, Fazio, who retired in 1998, earned a piddling and very liberal 6 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. He got a very respectable 85 percent approval from the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action over his career.
To read the entire McCaffrey story, go to the Associated Press by clicking here.
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
