The Hole in Hillary’s Flip-Flop Excuse

Hillary Clinton has a propensity to change her mind on big issues. She has reversed her positions on gay marriage, immigration, gun control, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, mass incarceration and the Iraq War, and some believe her recent stand on the Keystone XL pipeline constitutes a flip, too.

When CNN moderator Anderson Cooper called Clinton on her flip-floppery in Tuesday night’s presidential debate (“Will you say anything to get elected?” he asked), she defended her policy somersaults as expressions of political thoughtfulness rather than weakness.
 

“Well, actually, I have been very consistent,” Clinton said, arguing her unyielding fealty to “the same values and principles” over her entire life. “But like most human beings—including those of us who run for office—I do absorb new information. I do look at what’s happening in the world.” It is the information that changes, she led her questioner to understand, and when that new information surfaces, she folds it into her existing “values and principles.”
 
Clinton’s response, which portrayed changed views as consistency, mirrored the one she gave Chuck Todd two weeks ago on Meet the Press. Todd asked Clinton whether her positions change “out of political expediency.” She answered:
“I don’t think it reflects how people who are thoughtful actually conduct their lives. I mean, if we don’t learn, if we don’t, you know, make decisions based on the best information we have available, well, you know, that’s regrettable. And what I’ve always tried to do is to say, “OK, what is the best decision that I can think about making?” 
 
Everybody agrees that changing facts can justify a change in one’s view. But Clinton’s insistence that learning about “new” or “better” information propels her reassessments prompts this question: What was the new information?

To my knowledge, no new “information” about gay marriage emerged from the day she endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples to the day she demanded the right to same-sex marriage. The immigration, gun control and mass-incarceration issues have been similarly unrippled by shocking new findings. Likewise, the information required to make a stand against the Iraq War was not hidden. Other senators found it and took that position!

 Perhaps the anti-war information escaped Clinton’s notice—in which case, bad on her—or perhaps she viewed it and decided not to act on it—in which case, double-bad on her. And who among us had a better vantage from which to assemble an encyclopedic view on the Trans-Pacific Partnership than Clinton? She praised it endlessly while secretary of state, but pulled a moonshiner’s turn last week to skedaddle away from it.
 
If Clinton lived in Gobles, Michigan, had no library card and no Internet connection, we could accept her new-information excuse. But for the past 25 years, Clinton has had some of the best researchers at her disposal—a private staff, a campaign staff, the wizards at the State Department staff, a senatorial staff, the busy beavers from the Congressional Research Service and the White House staff.

And, in fact, every indication and story we know about Hillary Clinton’s policy work belabors just how much she studies and learns. So if new or better information has been the impetus for her policy shifts, she must concede that she has a fat history of taking the wrong position in the early going and then requiring a re-do. The constant need for re-dos appears to indicate that she’d make a lousy surgeon and a bad 3 a.m. president.

Is Clinton lazy? Inattentive? Cognitively impaired? Of course not. Nor does she really view the major issues as uncharted continents that require additional exploring. She knows what she thinks about most things, and what she thinks is heavily guided by what the “new information” contained in polls and political pressure tell her to think. In this regard, she’s more like other politicians than unlike them.

Politics demands malleable mathematics from its practitioners.

During President Bill Clinton’s administration, political flexibility was associated with triangulation—that is, taking a position that was above right or left and allowed Clinton to cherry-pick from his foes’ ideas and incorporate them into his own. Instead of triangulating, Hillary Clinton shapeshifts, guided less by a grand ideology and more by grand ambition. What good is consistency if it doesn’t bring you to power?
 
Every politician flip-flops. (Every politician except Bernie Sanders, that is.) But Clinton flip-flops so frequently that course changes have become her signature move. As long as there is new or better information to consult—and when isn’t there?—none of Clinton’s positions can be considered fixed or even rooted.

Reversing the Beats, who preached “First Thought, Best Thought,” Clinton has built a campaign on the mantra “Last Thought, Best Thought.” No slave to ideology—even her own progressive ideology—she promises to make every day of her presidency a surprise. Unless, of course, new information intrudes.
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“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, Sir?” Who said it? Not John Maynard Keynes! I recently changed my mind about Yankees fans. You? Send your flip-flops via email to [email protected]. My email alerts are composed by John Maynard Keynes, my Twitter feed is consistently good, and my RSS feed is not yet repaired. Sorry.