Hillary starts by saying that she’s running for president, and that she’s “in it to win it.” That might have been a cute tag line for her announcement, but its too tinny to make her trademark.

But it’s a tinny speech. As a front-runner should, Hillary is trying to absorb what seems most resonant from her opponents, so she tries to do some Obama-like hope-mongering and Edwards-like misery-mongering. She isn’t as good at it as either of them, but she doesn’t have to be. Given all her other strengths as a candidate, she doesn’t have to be a brilliant rhetoritician, she just has to be OK, and she is OK.

After all the fierce denunciations of Bush her complaint that, “Things are just not right, we’ve lost something these last six years,” seems very tame and even lame. She talks about the middle class and elicits gasps when she says “more people went bankrupt than graduated from college” last year. She tries some economic populism. People ask her, “Why can’t we get tough with China?” She says, “I say, ‘Because of this debt. How can you get tough with your banker?’” This is such nonsense. Did her husband’s administration “get tough with China”?

Soon she’s into the Iraq war. During Obama’s speech when people yelled from the audience, it was things like, “Yes!” and “We love you!” Hillary gets some anti-war heckling. And you realize here is someone, in the person of Hillary, trying to hold the right flank of the Democratic presidential field. And it’s not very far right at all.

“I know there are many people who wish we could do more,” she says over a few shouts of disapproval of the non-binding resolution from protestor-types at the side of the room. But this will be the “first time we will have said ‘no’ to President Bush.”

When she mentions her troops cap idea, someone yells about brining the troops home. She then says we’ve got to “threaten the Iraqi government,” and “take money away from their troops not our troops.” It’s as if she has to be in favor of defunding something, so she’s going to pick the Iraq troops that the Democrats used to favor of training. (If the Democrats continue on this trajectory, soon enough they’ll be calling for the U.S. to overthrow Maliki’s government by force of American arms.)

She doesn’t directly address her vote for the war, but says if she had been president in October 2002, “I would not have started this war.” There’s more rumbling. “I understand the frustration and the outrage,” but we “need 60 votes to cap the troops or cut off funding.” Which makes it sound like she would cut off the funding if she had the votes. She pledges that if the war is not over by January 2009, she will end it.

That’s it for Iraq, and she’s onto to domestic issues, surely with a sigh of relief. She talks about health care and taking the profits of oil companies (see video Jonah linked to below). She tries to wax Obamaesque: we need to “believe in ourselves, so we can actually see results”; “people are tired of politics as usual”; etc. But she has none of Obama’s magic.

She touts her credentials to fight back against right-wingers: “I know how they think, how they act, and how to defeat them.” “We can make history,” she says (including by ending the genocide in Darfur–maybe the troops in Iraq will be redeployed to the Sudan?). And sounds like Edwards when she says if we are “willing to stand up and fight, no one’s stopping us.”

On the whole, workmanlike, but maybe a little better than I expected.