Hillary's metamorphosis

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"I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants." Who recently blurted that out?

Pat Buchanan? Rep. Tom Tancredo? Nope, it was Hillary Clinton.

Which Democratic senator has expressed little public remorse in voting for 23 counts to authorize war against Iraq, and has scoffed, "Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade"?

Yep, Mrs. Clinton again.

And who frowned on frequent abortion, hoping it "does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances"? Need I even answer that? We all know the New York senator is moving ever rightward, but why so brazenly and suddenly?

The depressing answer is clear for any Northern liberal who wishes to be president: No Democratic presidential candidate has been elected without a Southern accent in the half-century since 1960. If the country in the last half-century has grown more conservative, the South is emblematic of that shift.

John F. Kennedy's long-ago success came by a razor-thin margin. He pulled it off by emphasizing national defense, space exploration and tax cuts that apparently created the necessary patina of conservatism Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton later naturally had with drawly good-old-boy personas.

In contrast, given the defeats of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it seems liberals from above the Mason-Dixon Line have little chance anymore of winning enough red states to capture the Electoral College. A sort-of-Southern-sounding Al Gore came close and won the popular vote in 2000.

Many on the left, however, feel the medicine of moving the party centerward is worse than the disease of continued irrelevance. Still, triangulation for a chameleon Mrs. Clinton relies on an emotional base that will cry Hillary, right or wrong.

Like her husband, Hillary Clinton generates just that diehard loyalty. Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill for which George W. Bush would have been demonized. Without a cry from Barbara Boxer or Al Franken, he pre-empted and bombed in the Balkans despite neither U.N. approval nor a U.S. Senate vote.