Heeding the Past As She Looks To the Future

The strategy, confidants say, has three elements. On social issues, it is to reassure moderate and conservative voters with such positions as her support of the death penalty, and to find rhetorical formulations on abortion and other issues -- on which her position is more liberal -- that she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values. On national security, it is to ensure that she has no votes or wavering statements that would give the GOP an opening to argue that she is not in favor of a full victory in Iraq. In her political positioning generally, it is to find occasions to prominently work across party lines -- to argue that she stands for pragmatism over the partisanship that many centrist voters especially dislike about Washington.

This is the same political map -- updated for the new circumstance of a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world -- that her husband used from 1995 on to navigate conflicts with the GOP in the budget battles of 1995 and 1996, and the impeachment drama of 1998 and 1999.

Even so, there are abundant historical ironies as Hillary Clinton seeks to tread this familiar path. More than any politician still in power, she is identified with the strategic miscalculations of 1993 and 1994 that vaulted congressional Republicans into the majority status they have held since.

Clinton and her advisers are operating on the bold but uncertain assumption that one of the most divisive figures of the past decade can be reintroduced to Americans as a reassuring and even uniting figure in this one.

A Taste for Political Combat

It was Newt Gingrich's success that left the then-first lady grasping for explanations -- and bereft of self-confidence. Days after the soon-to-be House speaker and his GOP "revolutionaries" stormed to power in the midterm elections, Hillary Clinton was commiserating with Dick Morris, the mostly Republican consultant who ran Bill Clinton's Arkansas team and would soon become the most influential voice on the White House political team. In tears, as Morris recalled it, she confessed: "I don't know which direction is up or down. Everything I thought was right was wrong."

She was the architect of the failed health care reform effort, the unpopularity of which helped fuel Republican success. Her dominant role in how to handle questions relating to the Clintons' investment in the Whitewater land deal had not prevented the controversy from metastasizing into a major distraction from the presidency. And two of her closest friends and former law partners had come to grief in Washington -- Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr. by suicide, Associate Attorney General Webster L. Hubbell by financial scandal -- with both cases causing major controversy for the administration.

The strategy that Hillary Clinton relies on today has its origins in the repositioning Morris crafted in those bleak days of early 1995. Here is another irony, because as a conservative commentator he is now one of her most vehement critics.

The strategy Morris advocated -- centrist positioning on the budget, and emphasis on small but concrete actions and rhetorical statements to underscore the incumbent's values -- came with relative ease to Bill Clinton. An accommodator by nature, he was instinctively comfortable with the split-the-difference brand of politics that Morris called "triangulation."

For Hillary Clinton, current and former aides acknowledge, it has been a much more arduous journey. These days, aides tout her willingness to sponsor bipartisan legislation and to enjoy a cordial relationship with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the leaders of the effort to impeach her husband. But in the early days of the Clinton White House, she was known for her zeal for combat. Her instinct was to regard political opponents with deep personal antagonism; she was certain they regarded her the same way.

In 1993, White House aide Rahm Emanuel -- now a Democratic House member from Illinois -- planned an event inviting prominent Republicans to a White House dinner as a way of garnering support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. He assumed he would win praise for a clever tactical maneuver. Instead, the first lady was infuriated. "What are you doing inviting these people in my home?" she said, according to people familiar with the episode. Nearly sobbing with anger, she told him: "These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us."

It was on health care that her early instincts to regard compromise as weakness had the most consequential effect. By the middle of 1994, it had become apparent to most of the White House political team that what the president had announced as his nonnegotiable goal -- health insurance for every citizen -- was unattainable. He was eager to signal a willingness to settle on a lesser but still considerable target -- 95 percent of the population covered. But she argued that anything less than 100 percent coverage would not represent an intellectually coherent solution to the problem.

One day in July 1994, the president was in Massachusetts when he slipped off message and announced that he would consider 95 percent coverage a victory. Hillary Clinton was at the White House when she got word of her husband's statement, and soon she was on the phone with him. "What the [expletive] are you doing up there?" she demanded, according to an aide who overheard the conversation. "You get back here right away." The next day, Clinton retracted his statement.