Just as the conventional wisdom is falling all over itself depicting Senator Clinton as a sensible centrist, along comes a letter signed by the senator herself to remind us of just what an irresponsible extremist she can be when she thinks no one is looking. “Our opponents will do anything rather than talk about the issues. They don’t want to talk about their plans to destroy Social Security, to roll back our civil and constitutional rights, to undermine American security by reducing the number of allies who will work with us around the world,” reads a passage from a fundraising letter signed by the junior senator from New York. The letter, sent by e-mail, was obtained yesterday by The New York Sun.

The Democrats mock Republicans for not being part of the “reality-based community,” but this rhetoric from Mrs. Clinton is falser than any pre-war claim of the Bush administration. You can criticize the Bush administration for a lot of things, but not wanting to talk about their plans for Social Security sure isn’t one of them. The president spoke about it for nearly half of his State of the Union address. He devoted his weekly radio address to the issue on February 12, February 26, and March 12.

He spoke about it in Montana and North Dakota on February 3, in Nebraska and Mrs. Clinton’s erstwhile home state of Arkansas on February 4, in Michigan on February 8, in Pennsylvania and North Carolina on February 10, in New Hampshire on February 16, in Indiana and New Jersey on March 4, Alabama and Kentucky on March 10, in Louisiana and Tennessee on March 11, in Arizona and Colorado on March 21, in New Mexico on March 22, in Iowa yesterday.

These weren’t just passing references – they were full-scale presidential appearances whose transcripts show up on the White House Web site with titles like “President Discusses Strengthening Social Security in Iowa” and “President Participates in Social Security Conversation in New Mexico.”

Mrs. Clinton may disagree with President Bush’s plans for Social Security, though she has so far failed, so far as we can tell, to offer any solution of her own to the problem of the program’s long-term solvency. But it’s just not accurate for her to say of the president that he doesn’t want to talk about this issue. He’s droned on about it so persistently that his speechwriters are suffering from Social Security fatigue. And that’s just Mr. Bush – it doesn’t count Vice President Cheney, who just last week held town hall meetings to discuss Social Security in Nevada and California.

The claim that Republicans don’t want to talk about their plans to “roll back our civil and constitutional rights” is similarly suspect. Mrs. Clinton herself voted for the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, the law most often cited by civil liberties advocates as a violation of rights. What civil rights is Mrs. Clinton so worried about? Her husband the president signed, in the dead of night, the Defense of Marriage Act that denied gays and lesbians the right to federal recognition of their marriages. President Bush’s cabinet includes Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Carlos Gutierrez, Elaine Chao, Norman Mineta, and Alphonso Jackson. Does Senator Clinton really believe – or really want her supporters to believe – that Mr. Bush wants to roll back civil rights? Does she think those kind of false accusations do anything to improve race relations in this country? Maybe the reason the Bush administration doesn’t want to talk about its plans to roll back civil rights is that it doesn’t have any such plans.

The same can be said of the Republicans’ supposed reluctance to talk about their plan “to undermine American security by reducing the number of allies who will work with us around the world.” They aren’t talking about such a plan to undermine American security because it doesn’t exist. In fact, it’s surprising that Mrs. Clinton, usually an astute political observer, missed the part of the president’s press conference back in April of 2004 when he said 17 of NATO’s 26 members were contributing forces to help secure Iraq and then said, “I don’t think people ought to demean the contributions of our friends into Iraq. People are sacrificing their lives in Iraq, from different countries. We ought to honor that, and we ought to welcome that. I’m proud of the coalition that is there.”

Mrs. Clinton’s letter makes reference to the “right wing attack machine.” But what she’s engaging in are the tactics of the left wing attack machine. If Mrs. Clinton is to succeed in building a reputation as a centrist capable of bipartisan cooperation – the kind of reputation she will need to be elected president or to withstand what could well be a formidable challenge from Edward Cox in the 2006 Senate race in New York – she may want to be more careful.