Over the weekend, The Omaha World-Herald endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton for president of the United States. This is the first time that the newspaper has endorsed a Democratic candidate for president since 1932, when it supported Franklin D. Roosevelt over the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover. (Even then, the Omaha paper was an outlier. FDR garnered the endorsements of only 41 percent of America's newspapers.) At that point, between the Great Depression and a prolonged drought, impoverished Nebraska farmers were setting up roadblocks to keep produce from reaching markets, occasionally battling police over their tactics. FDR carried the state with 62 percent of the vote.

Four years later, after the New Deal and everything else, the newspaper returned to form. It endorsed Alf Landon, who lost 46 states, winning only Maine and Vermont, but losing Nebraska 57 percent to 40. This year, the World-Herald abandoned its 84-year tradition for the second time, writing:

With that much on the line, the prudent vote would go toward the least risky candidate for president. Put another way, the candidate who would have the best chance to implement changes by working with Congress, foreign and domestic leaders and military leaders under normal circumstances as well as during a crisis. That candidate is Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Don't go too far out on that limb there, folks.

This endorsement comes after careful consideration and with some trepidation. Secretary Clinton, if elected, will need to gain the trust of a significant portion of Americans who are concerned about her private email server and attendant deleted emails, her handling of the Benghazi crisis and her longstanding quest for a single-payer health care system in the United States.

How did that last one get in there? Has HRC really been on a "long-standing quest for a single-payer health-care system in the United States"? Surely, her proposed health-care plan in 1993 wasn't anywhere close to that. If she's flirting toward that now, it's only in the context of fixing the Affordable Care Act rather than blowing it up entirely and returning to the status quo ante.

The risk of a Donald Trump presidency is simply too great.

Can't argue with them there.

This year's presidential election has been the country's most polarizing race in decades. If Secretary Clinton is elected, Americans will need her to be a uniting president, working from the center, and not advancing an agenda that will further alienate moderates and conservatives.

OK, no. That's not her first job, because this is not 1992, and she's likely going to be elected with a majority of the popular vote, and not with a plurality, which put her husband's presidency in a defensive crouch almost from Inauguration Day, a majority that he even failed to achieve in 1996, when he was running against Bob Dole, who was the closest thing to an Honorary Nominee as we've ever had. Not alienating moderates and conservatives ought not to be an exclusive priority. She will have more of a popular mandate than he did, so her priorities should be different. Not alienating the progressive wing of her party should be at the top of the list as well.

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It's no secret that HRC is not my first choice to be the next president. My opinion of the first Clinton presidency has changed enough in the intervening 20 years to make me dubious of a second. (This also is why I didn't vote for her in 2008.) Even absent the hacked e-mails in which her presidential campaign has been exposed as a presidential campaign—Breaking!—she still impresses me as too quick on the trigger as regards war and peace, too cozy by half with discredited centers of political and financial power, and a half-step too slick on issues like trade and environmental protection.

(Can we please have a straight answer, please, on TPP and fracking?)

However, and this is a big however, I think you make your decision this time around based on how deeply she understands the changes that have been wrought in the country and in its people in the days since the twin catastrophes of the Iraq War and the near-destruction of the world economy eight years ago. Does she know that the political world has changed, and that the universe of options available to a Democratic president is wider now even than it was when Barack Obama took office?

My call, strictly from the elbows, is that she does. She has a good, tough plan to pursue further reforms in the financial sector. She has gone far out on a limb publicly regarding the TPP agreement and the need for urgent action on the climate crisis. Now, it's easy to dismiss these as empty campaign promises to be broken sub rosa once she's elected, but there's another factor in play here that wasn't in play when her husband first was sworn in.

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In 1992, Bill Clinton climbed into the presidency over the bleached bones of progressive liberalism. He'd spent much of the campaign outmaneuvering Jesse Jackson. Triangulation was an effective strategy because it could be attacked effectively only from the right, which made Clinton's moves toward the center-right look reasonable. The objections of the Democratic Party's left flank could be safely ignored. This is a luxury that a President Hillary Rodham Clinton will not have.

There is now an active, powerful progressive counterweight both within the Congress in Washington and within the party in the country. Triangulation on certain issues will not be possible. If HRC wins, she will have won on more of a platform than the World-Herald thinks she has. She will not win simply because the Republicans have nominated a maniac, although there will be spinning to that effect almost immediately after the race has been called.

She will have won because people like Elizabeth Warren, and Sherrod Brown and, most of all, Bernie Sanders, worked for several years to create a force that broke up the coronation and pushed her off easy positions and in the direction that HRC's most earnest admirers insist she wanted to go all along. (Remember that, all during the first Clinton presidency, it was something of an article of faith that HRC was a leading liberal voice within the administration.) Should she renege on TPP, for example, or the Keystone XL pipeline, there will be hell to pay in and out of Congress, and there will be a political price to pay that her husband never had to consider. If there isn't, then that's on the people who should force her to pay it, not on her as president.

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Back in 1932, when the Omaha World-Herald got all giddy and endorsed that Roosevelt fella, the country was a mess, but FDR ran a cautious campaign, largely because the country was a mess and Hoover was taking most of the blame for it. He was genial and he made people feel very good, but he was deliberately vague about what he planned to do if he got elected.

Most famously, 84 years ago this Wednesday he delivered an economic speech in Pittsburgh that was a masterpiece of misdirection. (This speech was the central pivot of an episode in the third season of The West Wing.) The speech was very long on the perfidy and neglect of the incumbent administration. But it also contained a thwacking attack on "government spending" that would not have been out of place in the mouth of any conservative, Third Way, Pete Peterson fanboy Democrat in the 1990s.

The most obvious effect of extravagant Government spending is its burden on farm and industrial activity, and, for that nearly every Government unit in the United States is to blame. But when we come to consider prodigality and extravagance in the Federal Government, as distinguished from State or local government, we are talking about something even more dangerous. For upon the financial stability of the United States Government depends the stability of trade and employment, and of the entire banking, savings and insurance system of the Nation. To make things clear, to explain the exact nature of the present condition of the Federal pocketbook, I must go back to 1929. Many people throughout the land — rich and poor — have believed the fairy story which has been painstakingly circulated by this Administration, that the routine spending of our Federal Government has been kept on a fairly even keel during these past five years. It was perhaps easy to give this impression because the total outlay each year up to the emergency appropriations of this year did not increase alarmingly. But the joker in this is that the total outlay includes interest and sinking fund on the public debt; and those charges were going down steadily, right up to this year.

Once he got into office, of course, he electrified the country by virtually reinventing government spending. Then there was World War II and then there was a long economic expansion during which the modern American middle class was created.

Why it was almost as though, the day FDR got up in Pittsburgh, he had a public and private position on the critical economic issues of the day. It's almost as though presidents can do things once they get elected that they don't talk about on the campaign trail. It's almost as though being politically adept doesn't necessarily mean being politically duplicitous. It's almost as though not being "transparent" doesn't necessarily mean being corrupt. It's almost as though there is some sort of subtlety required to being president of the United States. It's almost as though, while every child should be able to dream about being president, not everybody can do that job.

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I believe there are forces in play that are substantial enough to allay the fears of progressives that HRC will turn into Max Baucus once she takes office. I believe she's smart enough to realize that these forces can work to the advantage of a Democratic president in a different political atmosphere than the one that greeted her husband when he was sworn in. I think she has run a steady campaign in a political year long gone to Bedlam. I think that counts for something more than simple ambition.

I also think that electing the first woman president to follow the two terms of the first African-American president would be an altogether remarkable event and that it's the best argument against the notion that electing HRC would be a demonstration of the status quo.

So, in the end, I guess I'm with her.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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