Think Hillary's having a hard time now? Wait until she's a candidate

Most significantly, she’s been mercurial about her position on an emerging nuclear deal with Iran that many of her party’s rank-and-file members are struggling to support. She hasn’t yet responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, which warned of the dangers of the president’s diplomacy. She’ll eventually have to take sides, but she has the luxury of time in devising her position.

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“Most likely, she’ll be muted. She’ll wait and see what happens with the negotiations. I don’t think you’ll hear her say something substantive for now, one way or another,” said one pro-Israel official with ties to Clinton.

For a sign of how difficult the issue is for Clinton, just look at the contradictory responses she gave when asked about the American response to Iran’s nuclear program. In an August 2014 interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton said, “I’ve always been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment.” But, as Goldberg wrote this week, the reported proposal being discussed is one that would “legitimate Iran’s right to enrich uranium” as a principle. After Obama pitched the benefits of his administration’s Iranian diplomacy in his State of the Union, Clinton announced her support to the president’s approach in Canada: “Why do we want to be the catalyst for the collapse of negotiations?” One month earlier, she told one of her top donors, Haim Saban, at the Brookings Institution that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” What gives?

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