Of course Clinton comes off as center-right to foreign viewers. That's their political spectrum. It's not ours. We don't respond to international forms and norms, because we can't really participate in them, even if we had the inclination to do so (which we by and large do not). We have to abide by our political spectrum to appropriately analyze it in a domestic context.
Blue Dog Democrats are, basically, your centrist political figures for Democratic Party candidates. Hillary Clinton has always been a liberal and never a centrist. She only became identified as such when the left-wing of the Democratic Party wanted to pursue its vision for the party and push the party toward its left-most years during the early 1970s. In so doing, they inadvertently or purposefully erased the Blue Dog wing of the party and used the Obama-Clinton wing as the proverbial center. They weren't but it became a cute thing for lefties to dream up.
Right (again, even in Canada she'd be considered right wing; from a European perspective I can only imagine she'd be flirting with the fringes), not centre-right, and yes, you're correct, it's a different frame of reference, I've acknowledged this.
However, even by an American standard/FoR, I can't really call her a liberal as liberals go in the party; if she is, she's on the right-most end of what can be called a liberal.
Remember, the Clintons are easily the most (in)famous of the 'third way' Dems, and in fact are fundamentally avatars of the movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way
The only way Clinton could be perceived as a bona-fide liberal is from a position on the right. To be fair, the political frame of reference/orthodoxy in America has slowly crept that way since the 70s, likely due to a combination of Reaganism and the right leaning explosion of money in politics as a consequence of Buckey v Valeo 76.
I think it is telling that you perceive the left as having such power and influence as to some how foster a collective perception of Clinton as a centrist/moderate; that was not our doing. We of the FDR/Sanders wing largely did not, and do not regard her as either (except perhaps as a euphemism/shorthand of convenience for her true stances), but as a corporatist; one who, like virtually every other Third Way Dem/Clintonian, put donor and corporate interests first and foremost before those of constituents. More than anything else, you can probably thank the media for her branding: we had little to do with it.
While I think it's true there might be an element of contrast principle at play, the fact is that the party as a whole, until recently, has only gotten more and more economically conservative, albeit socially liberal since, as you've said, the early 70s (again, likely due to the immense proliferation of private money in public office per Buckley v Valeo). Remember, once upon a time, the FDR wing was the norm and dominant wing as opposed to being branded 'fringe extremists' by both the establishment Dems of today and media sources friendly to them; the rightward shift in the party is painfully apparent and undeniable to anyone who's been paying attention. That having been said, in general, I don't think that Blue Dogs have been displaced (outside of the recent resurgence of the FDR wing) so much as
social conservatism has been displaced within the Dem party; the reasons for this seem pretty apparent to me: social justice costs megadonors nothing; economic justice costs them a lot. Meanwhile, Third Way Dems can, have and continue to lean heavily on identity politics and social liberalism to mask and smokescreen their rank economic conservatism.
Bottom line, if Clinton cannot be called a centrist of some stripe per the American FoR, left leaning or otherwise, it's only because political orthodoxy has moved unbelievably to the right. Moreover, despite this shift in orthodoxy and FoR among the political class, I think it's evident by now that the general populace has not subscribed to the same, which is in large part why Sanders (despite often being lampooned as extreme/fringe) does well and people who identify as 'centrists' generally do not (at least relatively), and probably would not come 2020.
