Do Hillary Clinton's 'radical letters' actually reveal her inner pragmatist?

With the 2016 presidential election just two years away, and presumptive candidates locked in a continuous will-they, won't-they dance with the media, campaign fodder is slowly beginning to trickle out.

For Hillary Clinton, that means returning to a perennial favorite, particularly with right-wing media: her college thesis on left-wing activist Saul Alinsky and her 1971 stint as a law clerk for the radical law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, based in Oakland, Calif.

A correspondence between the former Secretary of State, when she was still Hillary Rodham, and Mr. Alinsky, obtained by the conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon, sheds further light on her politics at the time.

Though the letters, of course, are not new; they come from the archives of the Industrial Areas Foundation. They show a young Hillary Rodham, living in Berkeley for the summer during her time as a student at Yale Law School, communicating with the famed activist in a casual, friendly manner. She asks about his forthcoming book, "Rules for Radicals." She suggests they should meet the next time he's in California. She closes the letter by writing, "I hope you are still well and fighting ... Hopefully we can have a good argument sometime in the future."

Alinsky, active in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, worked mainly to improve the lives of the poor in communities across the US.

While he has become associated with radical left-wing politics in current political thought, it's an association that's largely misplaced, says Mark Santow, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and the author of a forthcoming book on Alinsky.

Professor Santow says Alinsky's philosophy did not have a political persuasion. Rather, he was "relentlessly non-ideological." In fact, Santow says parts of Alinsky's thinking could be found in elements of today's Democrat and Republican Parties.

"He basically believed that American society was increasingly dominated by large institutions, governments, corporations," he says. "He thought that ordinary Americans had lost citizenship."

He adds: "He bears some resemblance to libertarians like William Buckley ... but he also bears resemblance togreen, new left politics on the other side as well."

Since leaving law school, Clinton, who was raised a Goldwater Republican and interned with Rep. Gerald R. Ford during college before switching to the Democratic Party, has led a political life characterized mainly by pragmatism. Unlike Alinsky, she elected not to go into community organizing, believing change was best achieved from within the political system, not outside of it, Santow notes.

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Do Hillary Clinton's 'radical letters' actually reveal her inner pragmatist?