So is Hillary a left-winger who, having masked that reality during her days as First Lady and in the Senate, is now coming clean? It’s more complex than that. Terms like “left” and “right” lump together a variety of subjects. To the extent Hillary has an ideological core, it’s economically progressive, culturally moderate and hawkish on foreign policy. She’s just stressed different aspects of this political identity at different times.

In the 1990s, for instance, while working behind the scenes, often unsuccessfully, to push Clinton administration economic policy to the left, Hillary tried to publicly overcome her lefty reputation by insisting that she wasn’t a cultural radical. In 1994, she said she was “not comfortable” with the distribution of condoms in schools and in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, she promoted abstinence and criticized easy divorce.

That wasn’t dishonest. As one Clinton administration aide put it, “She’s a very judgmental Methodist from the Midwest.” But today, with America’s cultural debate having moved left, Hillary is downplaying her judgmental, moral side and emphasizing her progressive economic views instead.

Similarly, after 9/11, Hillary trumpeted her hawkish foreign views. She not only voted to invade Iraq in 2002; the following year, she called for expanding the US military. That wasn’t dishonest either. During the 1990s, Hillary had been strongly influenced by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who championed military intervention in the Balkans. And in October 2000, almost a year before 9/11, she had given a speech at the Council Foreign Relations denouncing the refrain, then-associated with Albright’s nemesis, Colin Powell and now-associated with Barack Obama:

That we should intervene only when we face splendid little wars that we surely can win, preferably by overwhelming force in a relatively short period of time. To those who believe we should become involved only if it is easy to do, I think we have to say that America has never and should never shy away from the hard task if it is the right one.

But now, with Democratic voters less sympathetic to hawkish views, Hillary doesn’t talk that way either.

So was Hillary the original Elizabeth Warren? The problem with the question is that Warren is ideologically one-dimensional, while Hillary is not. Warren’s political identity is defined almost entirely by her economic views. Hillary, by contrast, looks different depending on which issues you emphasize. When her advisors say she’s held progressive economic views for a long time, they’re right. She’s also held a lot of other views, which they’d rather not talk about.

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