Hillary Clinton’s audacious renunciation of the trade agreement she helped negotiate and has bragged about and praised highly in the past is a naked political move that she must have calculated would help her:

With news leaking out that organized labor, the Teamsters in particular, are withholding an endorsement and might even endorse a Republican next year, Hillary is desperate to keep unions in the fold. Even if she holds off Bernie Sanders and Slow-Joe, without strong union support she probably can’t win in November.

So today Hillary announced that she opposes the new Pacific trade agreement that she helped negotiate while she was secretary of state. So she’s not only running against the free trade legacy of her husband and against President Obama””she’s running against herself.

Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I believe it’s possible to change one’s mind and be sincere. But Clinton’s history of repeated duplicity means that she’s forfeited the right to that presumption. However, just as a hypothetical, let’s say she is telling the truth. If so, she would have another problem to explain: how could she have shown such poor judgement as to advocate for the agreement again and again and again—in fact, 45 times between 2010 and 2013, when she was Secretary of State?

Here’s how she attempts to explain:

In July, Clinton told CNN that she never worked directly on the deal.

“I did not work on TPP,” Clinton said Thursday. “I advocated for a multi-national trade agreement that would ‘be the gold standard.’ But that was the responsibility of the United States trade representative.”

While technically true — Clinton’s State Department was not the lead negotiator on the deal — the former secretary of state regularly trumped up trade deals, including what would become the TPP…

…Clinton specifically cited currency manipulation enforcement, benefits for pharmaceutical companies and impacts on American workers as the reasons she was disapproving the deal.

Clinton’s Democratic opponents in the 2016 presidential race are against the deal, unions are against the deal, and now she’s against it too. It’s hard to imagine that a single thinking human being would be convinced that her change of heart and mind is on the merits here. For example, even Ezra Klein finds himself a mite perturbed:

Of late, Clinton is again looking like the kind of candidate who puts polls in front of policy.

First, she came out against Obamacare’s Cadillac tax ”” a policy that enjoys wide support among health economists. Clinton knows the problems of the massive deduction for employer-provided health insurance well; decades ago, her health-care plan wiped out the tax code’s preference for employer-based health care, and in 2008 she had a smaller, more targeted, version of the Cadillac tax in her proposal.

I want to be clear here. Lots of people oppose the Cadillac tax, and for lots of reasons. What I have trouble believing is that Clinton and her policy advisers really think the Cadillac tax is a bad idea. Her past policies embrace its theory, her past advisers helped pass it into law, and virtually everyone who spends their days thinking about how to control health-care costs considers it one of Obamacare’s most promising provisions.

On Wednesday, Clinton came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, saying that she’s concerned with the provisions around pharmaceuticals and the absence of provisions around currency manipulation. But as Tim Lee notes, Clinton strongly supported early versions of the deal ”” she called the TPP “the gold standard in trade agreements” ”” that were worse on pharmaceuticals and identical on currency manipulation…

I don’t truly know what’s in Clinton’s heart ”” perhaps I’m wrong, and despite all evidence to the contrary, she holds all these positions deeply ”” but as a close reader of her record, I’m not convinced that Clinton, in office, wouldn’t support policies like the Cadillac tax or negotiate trade deals like the TPP. And as someone trying to understand Clinton’s likely governing philosophy, it’s unnerving.

And this is a broader problem for Clinton. Her political weakness, fairly or not, is that the voters and the media ”” or maybe it’s the media and, thus, the voters ”” have decided that she’s unusually poll-tested and calculating, even for a politician.

Klein is not enough of a Clinton devotee to be able to say that 2 + 2 = 5 in this case, and he doesn’t even think it would help her to say so, because her flaws have become so obvious. But that doesn’t mean that many of her supporters will abandon her for this sort of thing. In fact, quite a few of them probably agree with this chilling yet revealing piece by Matt Yglesias, which is a must-read if you want to understand the heart/mind of the left:

Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.

This is normally portrayed as a political weakness of hers, and in many ways it is. She can’t credibly portray herself as the kind of outsider who’s going to clean up a broken and corrupt Washington system, because she is very much a part of that system and has been for years.

But it’s also an enormous source of potential strength. Committed Democrats and liberal-leaning interest groups are facing a reality in which any policy gains they achieve are going to come through the profligate use of executive authority, and Clinton is almost uniquely suited to deliver the goods. More than almost anyone else around, she knows where the levers of power lie, and she is comfortable pulling them, procedural niceties be damned.

Democrats have almost no chance of securing a majority in the US Senate and even worse odds of securing a majority in the House. So if there is a future for making progressive policy, that future is executive action.

So, there it is. Vote for Hillary! She’ll continue to trash the Constitution just like Obama in order to get what we want, because how else can we be successful in going around the will of the people?

For their own good, of course.

[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to the famous Emerson quote about “a foolish consistency” being the “hobgoblin of little minds.”]