Congenital Lawyer Redux

"She's a congenital liar." that was New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, assessing First Lady Hillary Clinton's responses on Whitewater, "Travelgate" and other now-distant flaps. The line was a tad strong (not to mention imprecise for a language maven) and it led her husband to say that if he weren't president, he would have punched Safire in the nose. But if Hillary hadn't flatly lied about those often-trumped-up scandals, she wasn't forthcoming either. Her parsimony with documents made it seem as if she had something to hide when she didn't. More like a "congenital lawyer."

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The lawyer is back, like one of her bad hairdos from the 1990s. Clinton was bruised in last week's Democratic debate in Philadelphia because she seemed trapped in a series of fuzzy nonresponses that might have worked in opaque corporate legal filings at the Rose Law Firm but sounded evasive and mealy-mouthed in politics. Her rivals pounded her for what John Edwards called "double talk." It reminded me of when President George H.W. Bush said in 1992 that his challenger, Gov. Bill Clinton, "wants to turn the White House into the Waffle House." (To drive home the point, Bush made the charge while campaigning at a Waffle House in Spartanburg, S.C.)

Of course, it didn't work for Bush. "Slick Willie" had other great strengths to compensate for his exasperating I-didn't-inhale word games. So did Franklin D. Roosevelt, who during the 1932 campaign was for the League of Nations—before he was against it. On Prohibition, he was neither a "wet" nor a "dry" but a "damp," a position for weasels that left resolving the legalization of alcohol to the states. Masters of politics get away with trimming, hedging and flip-flopping, while the John Kerrys of the world cannot.

We know Hillary isn't in a league with her husband or FDR as a politician, but is she agile enough to dodge all the incoming fire? Is she "Slick Hillary"? And what do her acrobatics on issues such as Iran, Social Security, driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and the Clinton Library records tell us about what it would be like to spend the next four or eight years with her?

On Iran, Clinton makes a decent case that she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, to build diplomatic pressure on the regime. But her claim last week that Barack Obama's plan for a new relationship with Iran would "short-circuit the diplomatic process" would be more convincing if the Clinton foreign policy she claims to have helped implement had done anything significant to advance that process when her husband was in office.

On another big debate topic—Social Security—Clinton's position on bolstering the entitlement for the soon-to-be-retiring baby boomers makes her sound like a politician of the 1980s, afraid to touch the "third rail." She may be right that the system isn't in immediate crisis, but repeating like an annoying mantra that she's against privatization (who among Democrats isn't?) and for "responsibility" is itself irresponsible. Contrary to her obfuscations, she must know perfectly well that wealthy retirees should pay taxes on their Social Security benefits just like ordinary income.