"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from," Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina."
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Indeed we will...
Just like George Bush, Clinton is incapable of mouthing the obvious: the War was a mistake, ipso facto, the vote for the war was a mistake. Clinton seems to place more value on image than substance, which is exactly the problem that led us into this outrageous disaster.
The rationale for this self-destructive behavior is yet again, political cowardice:
"She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ‘04," said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. "She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008."
What people will and do now want will be the truth. Edwards gets a pass (and my support) by his admission of error for his misguided vote, thus signalling both an acknowledgment of blame and therefore, a hope for rehabilitation, whereas, Clinton, by refusing to admit an error, thereby refuses to admit her personal responsibility for this mess, as if that vote meant nothing but a momentary lapse of judgment. When Clinton voted, Al-Queda gloated.
Nobody but the professional politicians and the media careerists were allegedly "fooled" by the faulty fixed intelligence. Anyone with a room-temperature IQ, upon close listening to Powell's UN presentation, would have discerned the obvious lack of hard evidence. Only those who wanted to believe believed.
That vote betrayed her to be the pandering political careerist we all suspect her of being, who'll say anything, vote anyway, if it leverages her into the Whitehouse.
The truth be damned, honesty be damned, personal responsibility be damned. Clinton pretends mealy-mouthed weasal words will hide her personal culpability for the 3000 dead Americans and quarter million dead Iraqiis. The American people are sick of the lies, sick of the vain glorious posturings of political cowards, sick of the lies to cover the lies, and Clinton still does nothing to break the pattern. For this, she will not win the Democratic Party nomination.
The times call for honesty, for admissions of guilt, and for courage to meet the full implications of the sheer horror of what we as a people have wrought in Iraq.
PS: From what I know of the the elections in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio), no Democratic candidate "went down to defeat", -mugged maybe, but certainly not defeat.