Hillary Clinton—Bolshevik?

Was First Lady Hillary Clinton really a “socialist foil” to her husband Bill? Depends which New York Times article by Amy Chozick you choose to believe. (photo: White House)

New York Times reporter Amy Chozick (4/21/15) is defending Hillary Clinton against charges that her adoption of Elizabeth Warren–style populist rhetoric is opportunistic. Bolstering Clinton’s advisers’ portrayal of their boss as “a populist fighter who for decades has been an advocate for families and children; only now have the party and primary voters caught up,” Chozick writes:

It is easy to forget that for years, Mrs. Clinton weathered criticism that she was too liberal, the socialist foil to her husband’s centrist agenda. Economists in the Clinton administration referred to the first lady and her aides as “the Bolsheviks.”

It’s not clear who was calling Hillary Rodham Clinton—a corporate attorney who insisted “you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks” (New York Times, 3/17/92)—a “socialist.” The source for the “Bolsheviks” reference, though, seems to be an article co-written late last year by Chozick herself (New York Times, 12/5/14) about Clinton’s role in her husband Bill’s administration:

Once in the White House, Mrs. Clinton was a different kind of first lady. Put in charge of revamping healthcare, she recruited a bright and supremely confident adviser in Ira C. Magaziner and assembled a bold if elaborate plan…. But the healthcare effort and its expansion of government involvement in the private sector proved politically toxic and generated deep internal division within the White House…. Some of the White House economists were dubious and privately called Mrs. Clinton’s healthcare team “the Bolsheviks.”

So the basis for referring to Clinton as a “Bolshevik” is her healthcare reform plan—a plan that was specifically designed (not unlike Obamacare) to maintain the role of private insurance companies in the healthcare system (Extra!, 1–2/94). The progressive alternative to her “managed competition” approach, a single-payer system in which for-profit health insurance would be replaced by universal public funding, was rejected out of hand by Clinton (New York Times, 3/27/08):

I never seriously considered a single-payer system…. Talking about single-payer really is a conversation-ender for most Americans, because then they become very nervous about socialized medicine and all the rest of this. So I never really seriously considered it.

Clinton’s healthcare proposal is an awfully thin reed upon which to hang a claim that she was her husband’s “socialist foil.”

That same Times article co-written by Chozick last year reported that Clinton was “integral to…her husband’s ideological positioning.” Citing Al From, an adviser to Bill Clinton who founded the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council, the article recounted:

Mr. From pushed for Mr. Clinton to run to the middle, and ultimately she signed off on that too. She approached Mr. From at a party. “I thought about it and you’re right, and we’re going to be a different kind of Democrat by the convention,” he remembered her saying.

But that version of Hillary Clinton’s history, in which she endorsed her husband’s shift to the right, was from before it became politically convenient to recast her as a longstanding populist.

You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.