Exhibiting a knack for political repositioning that has some Republicans tremulous about 2008, Senator Clinton nearly matched President Bush’s hawkishness in her remarks to the Jewish Community Relations Council yesterday morning, hours before she enthusiastically denounced his position on abortion at New York University in the afternoon.

The speeches demonstrated what some have identified as Mrs. Clinton’s skill in playing to her audience. At the 92nd Street Y, the senator delivered a keynote address to the Jewish council’s 26th annual New York Congressional Breakfast. Her remarks followed speeches by Senator Schumer and Reps. Charles Rangel, Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Major Owens, and Eliot Engel, all Democrats of New York, and came immediately after an address by the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom.

The previous speakers from Congress had all expressed admiration for Israel – Mr. Rangel called the Jewish state America’s “only true friend” in the Middle East – and several of them criticized Mr. Bush as insufficiently tough on the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Not to be outdone in taking a hard line against Middle East authoritarianism and terrorism, when Mrs. Clinton addressed the audience – which at various points during the breakfast included, among others, leaders of New York’s Jewish community, Democratic mayoral candidates Fernando Ferrer and C. Virginia Fields, and sex guru “Dr. Ruth” Westheimer – she called on the Palestinian Authority to “act with dispatch to dismantle terrorist organizations.”

The senator expressed hope that both state and stateless sponsors of terror would no longer “send killers into Israel,” and she called for the administration and the international community to keep pressure on Syria and Iran, praising France especially for “taking the lead in putting pressure on the Syrians.” Mrs. Clinton urged the United Nations “to go on record with an independent standing resolution condemning anti-Semitism.”

Mrs. Clinton also called on the international community to do more at Iraq, so that it is “no longer a primarily American effort.” That country, she said, is in “a holding pattern,” and the success of its new Shiite coalition government “will depend on the statesmanship and patriotism of who ever emerges as the leader.”

Mrs. Clinton nevertheless said Americans “have to do everything we can to support the nascent democracy in Iraq” and expressed hope that the process the elections started would “continue to spread to most of the region,” echoing the sentiments often expressed by members of the Bush administration that if democracy gained one foothold among Arab autocracies, it would soon carve out others.

Saying there is no more important task for America than to help with the present sweep of democracy in the world, Mrs. Clinton advocated abetting countries “trying desperately to join the community of democracies.”

And although prominent members and recent presidential candidates of Mrs. Clinton’s party have argued for the complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, the senator added that this country’s assistance “is not a partisan commitment, it’s an American commitment.”

In our efforts in spreading democracy to the Middle East,Mrs.Clinton said, “It is difficult for Americans to look at the casualties … not only the deaths, but the number of grievous injuries.” Mrs. Clinton said she was “concerned about how the American government treats wounded soldiers,” and she affirmed her commitment to making sure wounded soldiers receive the combat pay and benefits to which they are entitled, even when they are unable to participate in combat operations.

The senator said she had recently returned from a trip to Iraq,Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Kuwait and had met with American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Speaking of their comrades in arms who returned in caskets or bandages, she said, “We owe a debt of gratitude to the families.”

When the senator spoke of the same trip to her NYU audience, however, mention of America’s troops and their work in the Middle East was conspicuously absent, and no thanks were extended to their families.

Speaking in an auditorium filled with U.N. officials, students, diplomats, and women’s-rights activists, among others, Mrs. Clinton – widely assumed to be contemplating a presidential bid in 2008 – seemed to switch her appeal from red state to blue state as she touched on several issues related to women’s rights around the world, particularly her commitment to universal access to abortion.

In her keynote address at a public forum with the unwieldy title Women’s Rights are Human Rights – Beijing at Ten: Commemorating the Ten Year Anniversary of the United Nations Fourth World Conference, which was sponsored by NYU’s Center for Global Affairs and the Vital Voices Global Partnership, Mrs. Clinton was introduced by a video of her own remarks as first lady in Beijing, in which she declared, “Women’s rights are human rights.” In addressing the work yet to be done in attaining the goals set forth 10 years ago in China, Mrs. Clinton said too many women “lack the fundamental right to plan their own families.”

She added that it is “unfair for governments and people in developed countries who have access to the full range of reproductive and family health services to deny those to women in other countries around the world,” and she denounced the Bush administration’s policy of denying funds to international organizations that provide abortions.

Talking about the difficulties of women worldwide coerced into unwanted pregnancies, Mrs. Clinton said: “I regret that the government of my own country is making it more difficult for women in these situations to receive safe medical care.”She called the president’s policy “counterproductive” and said the reproductive-health “debate shouldn’t be about ideology, but about facts.”

“This issue – though it may be controversial in some quarters – lies at the very heart of women’s empowerment,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Placing access to abortion so central to her discussion of women’s rights appeared to distance Mrs. Clinton from a January speech that was seen as moderating her stance on abortion.In a January speech to Family Planning Advocates of New York State, Mrs. Clinton exhorted both sides of the abortion issue to seek “common ground,” signaling to many that she was trying to move to the center on an issue that may have harmed Democrats in November.

Mrs. Clinton’s NYU comments on reproductive health and family planning were interrupted several times by robust applause. At the end of her remarks – which also addressed human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and implementation of quotas for women’s participation in governments in developing democracies – the senator received a standing ovation. A Chinese women’s rights activist presented her with a plaque and said: “You are the pride of women around the world.” Mrs. Clinton also received standing ovations at the Jewish council’s event earlier.

To a political analyst, Dick Morris, a former adviser to the Clintons who is now one of their sharpest critics, the success Mrs. Clinton enjoyed in moving, within a few hours, from the right on foreign policy to the left on an issue of domestic significance was characteristic of New York’s junior senator.

“Hillary will be what she has to be, in front of whom she has to appear, and on the subjects that she must address,” Mr. Morris said in an e-mail to The New York Sun.

“But,” he said,”there is a method behind her inconsistency: Hawkish on male issues like defense. Leftish on female issues like abortion. Run with the gender stereotype at home. Flout it in foreign policy.”

Mrs. Clinton, he added, “is infinitely malleable.”

Several prominent Democrats, including Vice President Gore, Senator Kerry, and John Edwards, have been discussed as possible candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination, but recent polls show Mrs. Clinton, who would be the first woman to head the ticket of a major party, as the early front-runner. She has said only that she loves her work in the Senate, to which she was elected in 2000.