Doing the Hillary dance.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

What's a nice progressive legislator like Representative Tommy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, doing endorsing Hillary Clinton for President?

"The main reason," Baldwin said when I asked her that question, "is health care."

"I genuinely believe that she's always been committed to universal health care," Baldwin says. Clinton's failure to achieve that goal as First Lady, combined with her experience in the Senate, has only made her more savvy, she adds.

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But Hillary has yet to unveil her plan.

"She saw what happened last time she put every detail down on paper," says Baldwin, a co-chair of Clinton's Wisconsin campaign, referring to the Harry and Louise PR.

Keeping the details of the current plan under wraps, Baldwin says, is "one of the first signs that she learned a lot."

Nor is Baldwin put off by Clinton's massive fundraising, or her ties to big business. Any "serious, credible candidate" is going to have to raise a lot of cash, she says. Hillary has a staff of Washington insiders, including Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn, who have thoroughly worked the revolving door between government service and private industry--including lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry--as documented by The Nation in an article entitled "Hillary, Inc."

No matter, says Baldwin. "The thing that concerns me the most is having a person in the Presidency who understands the way special interests have hijacked this [health care] debate," she says. "It's being able to figure out a way to either minimize their clout or still move forward with things they may oppose."

Hillary's pragmatism--the idea that she knows how to play the game, both to get elected and to get things done--is perhaps the central argument for her candidacy. It's not exactly heart-stirring, but there is a cold, hard sense to this theory.

Baldwin, an out lesbian, and a co-chair of Hillary's LGBT leadership group, too, is happy that Hillary would be willing to repeal her husband's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gays in the military (an example of pragmatic, compromise legislation that Hillary now acknowledges is a failure).

She is understanding when Hillary talks about supporting the Defense of Marriage Act as a kind of rearguard action against a threatened marriage amendment to the Constitution. (Hillary says she would repeal the part of the law that denies same-sex couples the benefits married couples get.)

Even on the Iraq War, Baldwin gives Clinton a pass. "Quite obviously...