There is a downside to being frontrunner

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton is learning the downside of being the front-runner —more Democrats are getting antsy, finding her answers noncommittal, even Republicanesque.

At the seventh Democratic debate, staged at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the audience response to her “I’m not going to answer that” stance was almost hostile.

The former first lady proved critics wrong when she worked hard to be elected twice to the Senate from New York, where she had never before lived.

Now she seems so confident of getting her party’s presidential nomination that she is already moving to the center of the road to do battle with a Republican opponent, whoever that would be.

Centrism was her husband’s strategy, and it ushered them both into the White House in 1993.

But that was before the war in Iraq. It was before 9/11. It was before President Bush began beating the drums to confront Iran about its nuclear ambitions. It was before Israel attacked Syria. It was before actuaries decided that providing Social Security to 80 million people is impossible without higher taxes or lower benefits. It was before her failed effort to reform health care probably doomed the nation to doing nothing for decades. It was before immigration erupted as a political issue.

Candidate Clinton, who voted to authorize the current war, refuses to say U.S. soldiers would be brought home before 2013, a position many Republicans hold. As American casualties mount and all-out civil war looms, the clamor among Democrats is for the troops to come home now.

Increasingly, Clinton is cautious. She calls for yet another commission to examine Social Security, without seeming to have any answers herself. She won’t comment on whether Israel would be justified in bombing Iran. She says U.S. troops might have to stay in Iraq to confront al-Qaida operatives. She refuses to concede that her failure to compromise on health care was a mistake (but endorses a plan she refused to consider a decade ago). She bristles when her judgment is questioned on what she has called the most important vote of her career — invading Iraq.

In some ways it’s hard to fault her strategy. Primary elections are fought on the edges, with candidates desperate to win the party’s base. But in general elections, the nominees sound broader themes, desperate to attract independent voters. In an evenly divided country, nobody can be elected president without winning voters outside his/her party.

Clinton thinks that she can afford to go outside her base even before the primaries to try to convince skeptics that she could win a general election and that her high negatives ultimately won’t be a factor.

The last debate was informative. It showed that John Edwards has passion and is emerging as a strong contrast to her. It showed that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and, to a lesser extent, Bill Richardson and even Mike Gravel and the strange Dennis Kucinich (a voting age of 16?) are making strong arguments that she is vulnerable, that her convictions are open to pragmatism, that wavering Democrats are less than overwhelmed with her positions.

Double-digit leads

Clearly, she remains the favorite to win the Democratic nomination, with polls having her in double-digit leads. But she is not strong enough to take her supporters for granted. She is not positioned well enough to refuse to answer legitimate questions. And her frequent off-putting stridency is irritating.

She even refused to say whether she would back her beloved Chicago Cubs or her newfound love, the Yankees, if, supposedly, they were both in the World Series. Increasingly, this is a candidate who wants to keep her cake and eat it, too. We wonder if, as president, she might suddenly develop strong opinions we never knew about.

Most Americans have not watched the debates. That will change as they realize that we could have a Republican nominee and a Democratic nominee in just over four months.

We all know this will be a crucial election, and that foreign policy as well as the economy will be the big issues. Sometime soon we have to figure out how to fund Social Security and Medicare as demand grows explosively.

A candidate who waffles, even as articulately as Hillary Clinton does it, could be tossed aside even though a strong Republican nominee has not yet emerged.

Encouragingly, fewer voters express serious reservations about electing a woman as president. But that outmoded bugaboo might be the least of her worries. Americans want a strong, capable, intelligent, experienced, thoughtful, diplomatic and decisive president. The nomination may be hers to lose; the presidency is not.

X Scripps Howard columnist Ann McFeatters has covered the White House and national politics since 1986.