Hillary Clinton's status as a liberal icon has always been based on leaps of logic, as opposed to her record.

As the first lady, she actively supported Bill Clinton's anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-human rights trade policies, from the North American Free Trade Agreement to permanent most favored nation trading status for China.

She defended the Clinton administration's draconian welfare reform schemes, which her old allies at the Children's Defense Fund correctly identified as the shredding of the social safety net for America's poorest children.

And she took the lead in drafting a bureaucratic health care reform plan that rejected the sensible single-payer model in favor of a scheme to funnel federal money into the pockets of some of the worst players in the for-profit health care industry.

At a time when Democrats like U.S. Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Maxine Waters of California were battling the corporate-sponsored free trade agenda; when Nydia M. Velzquez, D-N.Y., and Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., were battling to defend the interests of low-income families; and when Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., were championing real health care reform, Hillary Clinton always refused to ask the tough questions, take the tough stands or abandon the risk-averse course set by the Clinton administration.

When Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, there was a brief flurry of hopeful speculation that she would emerge as the liberal her most ardent supporters - and her silly right-wing critics - believed her to be. But, in the Senate, Clinton has generally served as an uninspired, if competent, moderate.

With other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she has stood up to some of the worst of President Bush's judicial nominees, and like the vast majority of Senate Democrats she has voted against the worst elements of the Bush economic agenda.

But no one is going to confuse Hillary Clinton, who has cozied up to the conservative, corporation-funded Democratic Leadership Council, with a progressive reformer. She remains the conventional inside-the-Beltway pol who angrily shouted, "Russ, live in the real world," after U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., tried to explain why Democrats should embrace campaign finance reforms he had proposed.

Hillary Clinton's determination to remain in the cautious, unquestioning center was very much on display last fall, when the Bush administration came to Congress seeking a blank check to wage an unnecessary and unjustified war with Iraq. While other senators expressed concern over the failure of the Bush administration to make a credible case that Iraq posed a serious threat, Clinton bought the White House line.

"I will take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible," she declared.

Twenty-three more skeptical senators chose not to take the president at his word. Among them were Bob Graham, D-Fla., who then chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. While Clinton was praising the president's pronouncements, the skeptics voted "no."

Now, as each day brings new revelations about the "creative" analysis of intelligence information by the administration, the skeptics are looking more and more visionary. And what of Hillary Clinton?

She is in the midst of a furor about a few paragraphs in her new autobiography, which suggest that she was surprised by her husband's admission, more than six months after the initial public reports of his affair with Monica Lewinsky, that he had indeed cheated on her. Her right-wing critics have gone so far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton must be lying.

But let's be fair here: If Hillary Clinton was willing to believe George W. Bush's pronouncements with regard to Iraq, why would anyone find it hard to accept that she believed another president's dubious claims?

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