On Keystone and the NSA, Clinton Remains Quiet

On Friday, Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that has been described as 'a make-work program for former Clinton hands,' and that is busy building a database of donors and volunteers that the group will eventually sell or rent to an official Clinton campaign, held an all-day meeting at the Sheraton on Fifty-third Street, in New York.

In what it billed as a National Finance Council meeting, the super PAC sponsored a series of panels with well-known personalities from the Clinton world. Interspersed between seminars on politics and the media, state officials delivered testimonials before donors under the rubric 'Why I'm Ready for Hillary.' Clinton was actually in town to deliver a speech a few blocks away, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, but she didn't stop by the Sheraton. The Ready for Hillary event was like a 'Star Trek' convention where Captain Kirk never shows up.

The discussion panels were closed to the press, but reporters assembled in a room down the hall and a steady stream of Clintonites visited to take questions. Most everyone dutifully noted that the Clinton candidacy was still just a hypothetical, but occasionally some activists slipped. Buffy Wicks, the executive director of Ready for Hillary, started one sentence with 'When Hillary Clinton decides to run...,' dispensing with the façade.

It was an odd event: reporters asked questions about Hillary Clinton's plans and policy agenda to a group of people who knew as little as anyone about her presumptive campaign and its messaging. In that sense, the Ready for Hillary meeting was the perfect embodiment of the Democrats' current Hillary problem: everyone in the party seems to be supporting her, and yet nobody can articulate exactly why. (I wrote for the magazine recently about Clinton's seeming inevitability as a Presidential candidate.)

The meeting came at the end of an eventful week-one that only underscored Clinton's continued reluctance to explain what she might want to do as President. In Congress, the Senate debated two major issues: the Keystone XL pipeline and reform of the National Security Agency. Clinton remained silent about both.

As Secretary of State, Clinton was in charge of the process that will eventually lead to a decision about whether the Administration allows TransCanada to build its pipeline, which would transport crude oil from northern Alberta down to American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. It has become a defining issue for U.S. environmentalists, and was one of the most politically charged and significant issues that Clinton faced during her time at State-and yet her memoir, 'Hard Choices,' contains not a single mention of Keystone. When the Senate this week debated a bill to force Obama to build the pipeline-rallied by Mary Landrieu, the Democratic senator from Louisiana, who faces a runoff election in December-Clinton still had nothing to say.

To be sure, the sensitive review process for Keystone is ongoing, and Clinton might feel that, by discussing her personal views, she would be prejudicing the outcome. Then again, if she has strong feelings one way or the other, shouldn't she use her influence to affect the final decision?

N.S.A. reform is mentioned in 'Hard Choices,' but only cursorily, in a summary of the public reaction to Edward Snowden's leaks. 'Scrutiny focused on the bulk collection of telephone records, not the content of the conversations or the identities of callers but a database of phone numbers, and the time and duration of calls, that could be examined if there was a reasonable suspicion that a particular number was associated with terrorism,' she writes, with clinical detachment, in assessing the fallout. 'President Obama has since called on Congress to implement a number of reforms so the government will no longer keep such data.'

What does Clinton think of those reforms? She doesn't say. She offers the usual platitudes about balancing security and liberty but gives no indication of whether she believes that the program under which the N.S.A. collects Americans' phone records should be continued as is, modified, or scrapped. When the Senate killed the main N.S.A.-reform bill this week, Clinton remained silent.

For months, she also maintained silence on immigration, but on Thursday, after the President announced that he would use his authority to prevent as many as five million undocumented immigrants from being subject to deportation, Clinton released a rare statement endorsing the proposal. She did something similar in August, when, after being pressured from the left, she spoke about the events in Ferguson, Missouri.

But, despite the clear remarks about Ferguson and immigration, Clinton's views on many crucial issues remain opaque. She seems to be repeating the same mistake that she made in 2008, when the inevitability of her candidacy overwhelmed its justification.

At the Ready for Hillary festival, Mitch Stewart, one of Obama's top organizers in the 2008 contest, suggested that Clinton needed to be careful to develop a message and stick to it. He noted that she had failed to do that in the 2008 primaries. 'Every six weeks, there seemed to be a new slogan, and there was nothing people could wrap their arms around,' Stewart said.

But when he and others at the event were asked what that message should be, nobody really had any idea.