RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mrs. Clinton was the keynoter at Columbia University’s 18th annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum. Her campaign website headlines the speech “It’s Time to End the Era of Mass Incarceration,” and the headline of Allen’s piece reads “Hillary Clinton Just Gave One of the Most Important Speeches of Her Career.” Here’s how Allen begins:

Fair or unfair, Democrats’ chief criticism of Hillary Clinton has been that she doesn’t truly share their most cherished values, particularly when it comes to addressing inequality. They also worry that she’s not ready for prime time—that she’s too stilted, too programmed, too cold on the stump.

On Wednesday she answered both points.

Her first major policy address of the 2016 campaign was Clinton at her finest, showcasing both strong policy chops and a deep sensitivity to Americans who are heartbroken over the deaths of young black men at the hands of police officers.

Indeed, she read the names—Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin—and said “the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” without specifying what the disparate and in some cases uncertain fact patterns in these cases have in common.

“She freely moved between prose and statistic,” gushes Allen, referring to her invocation of the Fox Butterfield fallacy: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t offer much by way of policy proposals, apart from body cameras for police and “community mental health centers.” “I don’t know all the answers,” she said. “That’s why I’m here—to ask all the smart people in Columbia and New York to start thinking this through with me.” But she was clear about the goal of turning many prisoners loose: “It’s time to change our approach. It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe.”

According to Allen, Mrs. Clinton’s speech “wove two criminal justice reform proposals into a far broader and deeper campaign narrative”:

The Democratic Party’s core policy agenda in a post-Obama—and post-Obamacare—era is resolving the ills of poverty, inequality, substance abuse, and the broken criminal justice and mental health systems. It is about the idea, as she put it, that “no one is disposable. Every life matters.”

For many in the Democratic Party, particularly in minority communities, that is the great unfinished business of the Obama presidency, the promise that must still be fulfilled.

His conclusion: “If this is the Hillary Clinton that hits the campaign trail for the next 18 months, she’ll be a far more formidable candidate than the halting speaker who struggled to articulate a raison d’être in 2008.”

But in all Allen’s praise for Mrs. Clinton, there’s a curious omission: He never gives her credit for taking a political risk.

About the politics of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, there’s little doubt Allen is correct up to a point. This will make it easier for liberal Democrats to overcome their misgivings and submit to her inevitability. Which is not to say it renders them defenseless against her; the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan notes a telling omission from her speech:

In effect, she was saying that policies put in place when her husband Bill Clinton was president have not worked. [Mrs.] Clinton did not mention her husband or identify exactly which laws and sentencing policies she thought had gone wrong. But many of those policies grew out of the crackdown on drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses that took place before and during Bill Clinton’s presidency 20 years ago.

That put Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman Jesse Ferguson on the defensive. “Spoiler Alert,” he tweeted: “HRC policy on internet might also be different than WJC policy in 1994. Not b/c he was wrong but b/c times change.” (We gather that means she has another speech in the works renouncing her husband’s support for Internet freedom.)

But as for crime, Mrs. Clinton’s speech belies Ferguson’s implication that her views have changed since the 1990s because “times change”:

The inequities that persist in our justice system undermine this shared vision of what America can be and should be.

I learned this firsthand as a young attorney just out of law school—at one of those law schools that will remain nameless here at Columbia. One of my earliest jobs for the Children’s Defense Fund . . . was studying the problem then of youth, teenagers, sometimes preteens, incarcerated in adult jails. Then, as director of the University of Arkansas School of Law’s legal aid clinic, I advocated on behalf of prison inmates and poor families.

I saw repeatedly how our legal system can be and all too often is stacked against those who have the least power, who are the most vulnerable.

I saw how families could be and were torn apart by excessive incarceration. I saw the toll on children growing up in homes shattered by poverty and prison.

So, unfortunately, I know these are not new challenges by any means.

Mrs. Clinton (then Miss Rodham) finished law school in 1973. Maybe over the next 40 years times changed, then changed back again. But one’s natural reaction to all this is not to suspect Mrs. Clinton of sincerity. That said, at least some liberals will agree with Slate’s Jamelle Bouie: “It doesn’t matter if its [sic] sincere or not . . . it matters that she’s making a public commitment to an issue.”

It’s far from clear, however, that this approach will help her win the general election. Allen argues to the contrary that it has bipartisan appeal:

The filling of American prisons has become so powerful for voters that both Democrats and Republicans are trying to tackle it in Washington. That bipartisanship is the ultimate proof that the issue of mass incarceration has reached critical mass.

Mrs. Clinton herself cited efforts by GOP Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee “to restore balance to our criminal justice system.” And it’s true that “law and order” has been out of fashion of late, as evidenced by five states’ legislative abolition of the death penalty since 2007.

There would appear to be a feedback loop here: The high crime of the 1970s and 1980s heightened public vigilance and led to tougher crime policies, of the sort Mr. Clinton supported. That reduced crime, so that the public became less vigilant and more open to arguments about excesses of criminal justice. (Therein lies the appeal of the Butterfield Fallacy.)

But while crime statistics may look considerably better in 2015 than they did in 1990, the images on television—riots in Baltimore, and earlier in Ferguson, Mo.; lawless disorder in other cities, including New York—have the potential to change public opinion, too. If we see more of the same over the next 18 months—a realistic prospect, perhaps even a likely one—will voters, particularly swing voters in the suburbs, go to the polls next November eager, as Allen puts it, to complete “the great unfinished business of the Obama presidency”?

A cautionary example can be found at the conclusion of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, when she praises the conference’s namesake:

David Dinkins is a leader we can look to. We know what he stood for. Let us take the challenge and example he presents and think about what we must do to make sure that this country we love—this city we live in—are both good and great.

Dinkins was elected mayor of New York in 1989, a time of high crime and racial strife. He defeated the combative incumbent Ed Koch in the primary and the law-and-order Republican Rudy Giuliani in the general election. In endorsing Dinkins, the New York Times declared that “his most evident characteristic” was that he was “a conciliator” whose “instinct is to unify.”

City crime rates peaked in 1990, the first year of Dinkins’s mayoralty—which is to say that they began their long decline on his watch. But Dinkins’s term also saw repeated outbreaks of disorder and rioting—in Flatbush (Brooklyn) in 1990, Crown Heights (Brooklyn) in 1991 and Washington Heights (Manhattan) in 1992. The sense that Dinkins was ineffectual and the city was out of control led New Yorkers to oust the incumbent in favor of Giuliani in 1993. The city didn’t elect another Democratic mayor for 20 years.

Ideologues, including liberal ones, tend to see riots as confirming their own worldview. One suspects nonideological voters are more apt to see them as a sign of failed leadership—which, after two terms of a Democratic president, would translate into an advantage for the GOP. Mrs. Clinton’s embrace of gentler crime policies may be completely calculated and still turn out to be a miscalculation.