Revising And Extending My Remarks On Hillary Clinton

I was a bit surprised to see so many people focusing on the substantive question that tripped up Hillary Clinton in Tuesday's debate, and not what the episode revealed about her political character. To reiterate, I think Eliot Spitzer is a great leader, and what he is doing on the driver's license issue, particularly by beating back the hate speech of the likes of Lou Dobbs, is admirable. There are illegal drivers on the roads because we don't have a functioning public transit system in America. The driver's license should not be the main form of ID in America, it should simply allow you to operate a motor vehicle. If you have unlicensed drivers all over the roads, there are going to be serious public safety issues. That's all this issue is about, and it's not a federal one, furthermore.

I initially thought Clinton nailed the issue and was far better than Chris Dodd, who frankly sounded clueless about it. But her eventual response, marked by a backtrack to "I understand but I do not endorse," trying to be on all sides of it, was revelatory. It was status quo, all-things-to-all-people, value-challenged Democratic politics. I reject that. Apparently Clinton tried to clean up her response yesterday, but even that wasn't crystal clear.

So here's the statement that Camp Hillary gave to The Times today in response to questions about where she stands on the issue:

"Senator Clinton supports governors like Governor Spitzer who believe they need such a measure to deal with the crisis caused by this administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform," her campaign said.

It's almost too obvious to point out, but this just isn't an expression of support for Spitzer's proposed policies in any way. It even falls short of overt support for Spitzer in general -- it says she supports governors "like" Spitzer who are faced with policy conundrums of this sort. This is basically a clearer way of saying what she said yesterday -- Spitzer is trying to solve a problem that needs to be solved, and she supports the idea of trying to do something about it with policies similar to these.

The AFSCME endorsement kind of blunted the impact of this waffling, although John Edwards nabbing the New Hampshire SEIU may prove more important. The point is less about the contentious issue of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants - one that State Senator Gil Cedillo has been nobly pushing out here in California for years - it's about Hillary Clinton's judgment. She is far too constrained by political expediency, and would rather dance around a tough issue than lead on it and bring people to her position. That's not the kind of leadership I really want to see in the White House.