Senator Clinton unveiled her 2008 domestic policy platform — er, sorry, the Democratic Leadership Council’s “American Dream Initiative”— yesterday in Denver. Though members of the DLC are supposed to be New Democrats, this latest policy gruel is enough to make us wonder just exactly how they differ from the old Democrats.

Faced with a homeownership rate that for every single quarter of the Bush administration has exceeded every single quarter of the Clinton administration, Mrs. Clinton decided to tackle a problem that doesn’t exist by creating a vast federal government program to expand homeownership. She proposes expanding the home-mortgage interest deduction to those who don’t itemize their taxes, and she proposes $35 billion in new federal spending on “down payment assistance.”

Faced with an innovative and dynamic hedge fund industry that is generating vast wealth in her home state of New York, Mrs. Clinton’s “American Dream” is to subject it to new government regulation. She calls for “Greater oversight over hedge funds, which tend to encourage a focus on short-term factors rather than the long term; the SEC may need the authority to exercise appropriate oversight over hedge funds to ensure that they account for the needs of longterm investors.” Given the nearly $100,000 that Mrs. Clinton made during 10 months of trading cattle futures contracts in 1978 and 1979, we don’t doubt her ability to differentiate between short-term and long-term investors.

After fighting ferociously against President Bush’s plan for private retirement accounts as part of Social Security, Mrs. Clinton and the Democrats propose “American Dream Accounts.” If the Democrats think private retirement accounts are such a fine idea, why did they so adamantly fight Mr. Bush on Social Security? If voters are looking for private accounts, they should probably go with the party that didn’t obstruct them on the last go-round.

The centerpiece of the “American Dream Initiative” is a plan to funnel more than $150 billion in new federal aid to a die-hard Democratic constituency, college professors.This is swathed in language about “America’s success in the global economy,”but it looks an awful lot like a plan to subject yet more impressionable young Americans to indoctrination by unionized, lopsidedly left-wing professors. If America has an education problem, it’s that the government-run, unionized public school monopolies haven’t been preparing students to succeed at college-level academic work. Mrs.Clinton offers no solution to that but to lavish more government money on the colleges, many of which are already so well-endowed that they are spending their funds on fancy student centers instead of science laboratories or libraries.

The New York Post reported yesterday that the Clinton campaign had paid $2,500 for hairstyling and $2,900 for makeup for the candidate. It’s reminiscent of President Clinton’s famous Air Force One haircut on the runway at LAX in May 1993 by Christophe of Beverly Hills. Mrs. Clinton looks untouchable for re-election in the 2006 New York Senate race and does strongly among Democrats asked about 2008. But if this is to be her domestic agenda, we’d expect an awful lot of voters between now and 2008 to pause and ask themselves whether they really want to go back down this road.