If this was the “October surprise” that was supposed to damage Hillary Clinton, the biggest shock so far is how tame it is. PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCY NICHOLSON / REUTERS

Since last Friday, WikiLeaks has been posting online e-mails and documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her campaign. On Wednesday alone, the organization released about nineteen hundred e-mails in two batches. The materials appear to have been obtained when someone hacked the e-mail account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman. The Clinton campaign is blaming the Russian government and alleging that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are in cahoots with the Kremlin to help elect Donald Trump. WikiLeaks, as usual, isn't saying where it got its material.

If the Russians are trying to interfere in the U.S. election, it is an outrage. And this leak, like prior high-profile leaks, has raised questions for media outlets about how to report on hacked private communications. But there’s no denying that some of the materials, particularly the extracts of paid speeches that Clinton delivered after leaving the State Department, in 2012, are of genuine public interest. Still, going through these materials over the past couple of days, I found them illuminating but underwhelming. If this was the “October surprise” we’ve heard so much about, the biggest shock so far is how tame it is.

So far, the documents have contained a few embarrassing revelations for Clinton—but they’ve been mild ones. Certain e-mails have confirmed that her campaign has been carefully scripted, to the point where numerous aides weigh in on something as mundane as the text of a tweet. The speech extracts, collected in an internal campaign document, showed Clinton courting senior figures from Wall Street, sympathizing with them for the blame they shouldered after the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, and telling them she valued their counsel on policy issues. In one speech, she acknowledged that, given her life style, she was "far removed" from the concerns of middle-class Americans. In another speech, she made a case for the political necessity of adopting different positions in public and private.

But did any of this surprise anybody? The stage-managed nature of Clinton's campaign has been obvious all along: this is a candidate who went almost nine months without holding a proper press conference. The perception that Clinton had cozied up to bankers in return for large speaking fees was one reason so many Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. The wealth that Clinton and her husband have amassed since he left office in 2000 was hardly a secret. And, from welfare reform to same-sex marriage to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Clinton's willingness to tack with the wind on policy issues has been a recurring feature of her career.

The real value of the WikiLeaks documents is one the hackers may not have intended. The documents, particularly the speech extracts, portray Clinton as she is: a hard-headed centrist who believes that electoral politics inevitably involve making compromises, dealing with powerful interest groups, and, where necessary, amending unpopular policy positions. Addressing a General Electric Global Leadership Meeting in January, 2014, she said, "I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be." Answering a question in March, 2014, at an event organized by Xerox, she said that the country needs two "sensible, moderate, pragmatic parties.” These sentiments won't win over many Sanders supporters. But they might actually reassure moderate Democrats, independents, and even some Trump-loathing Republicans who are thinking about crossing party lines.

As a centrist Democrat, Clinton believes that more needs to be done to raise wages, reduce inequality, and promote social mobility. Her campaign platform includes a range of proposals aimed at helping working families and their children, which would be financed by substantial tax increases on the very wealthiest Americans. Many of these policies presumably hadn't been formulated when she gave her speeches, and, even if they had been, she didn't get into specifics, at least according to the extracts that have been made public so far. But she did talk about the millions of Americans who are struggling financially.

"Have we just walled ourselves off from those people and have no reason to understand or care about them?" she asked at the General Electric Global Leadership Meeting. "I think that's unfortunate, because, you know, we need to get back to Henry Ford paying his workers a high wage because he wanted people to buy his cars. You know, economic growth will take off when people in the middle feel more secure again and start spending again." In the same speech, Clinton called for efforts “to make sure that people have those ladders of opportunity that somebody like me took advantage of. And so, inequality to me is the other side of the coin of growth, and we need to do—we need to take care of both.”

Clinton's adoption of the language of opportunity and growth, rather than the language of redistribution and class conflict, is indicative of her political vintage. Like most Democrats of her generation, she believes there is a viable middle ground that even some wealthy folk can be persuaded to occupy. At an event organized by J.P. Morgan Chase in April, 2014, she said that people's worries that they, and their children, were no longer getting ahead deserved "thoughtful discussion, not the us-versus-them, finger-pointing, blame-placing, because that's not going to get us anywhere." Then she went on, "But, if we do not address and figure out how we're going to revitalize the middle class and begin the process of once again encouraging more people to rise up, then what I fear is that our politics and our social fabric are going to be dramatically altered."

In April, 2013, addressing the National Multifamily Housing Council, a trade group for landlords and developers, Clinton spoke at some length about her approach to politics in a divided system of government. She recalled how Abraham Lincoln, when he was maneuvering to secure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, appealed for help to William H. Seward, his former rival for the Republican Presidential nomination. "And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how to make a deal, and they just kept going at it," Clinton explained. She then brought up the sausage-making analogy, which is often attributed to Bismarck, and went on. "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back-room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position." Placed in its proper context, the last sentence is far less damning than it appears in isolation.

In terms of foreign policy, the extracts portray Clinton as someone who views the world primarily through the prism of American self-interest. If the phrase didn't have nativist and anti-Semitic connotations, she might even be called an America Firster. In several of her speeches, she boasted about how, as Secretary of State, she had helped American exporters, such as Dow Corning, fight off discriminatory policies imposed by China. Arguing in favor of the Obama Administration's "pivot" to Asia, she pointed out that forty per cent of American exports passed through the South China Sea, and added, "We are in a competition for the future, and we need more partners and fewer adversaries."