Hillary's Iraq problem
by kos
Wed Feb 14, 2007 at 09:15:01 AM PDT
Slot this in the "cry me a river" category:
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers do not relish the idea of someone bringing up her 2002 Senate vote at every campaign stop.
Clinton cast a vote that has led to one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in this nation's history -- a vote that even cursory skepticism would've counseled against.
Most of the presidential candidates have gotten the "I fracked up the vote" stuff out of the way last year. It's not the most compelling tack to take -- if their judgment was so poor as to vote for the darn thing, why should we promote them. We talk about DC being a place where people fail upward. Do we really want to encourage that within our own party?
But in any case, pro-war Dems who have unequivocally admitted their mistake don't have to offer tortured justifications for their war. They can honestly take Clinton pollster Mark Penn's advice:
It’s important for all Democrats to keep the word ‘mistake’ firmly on the Republicans and on President Bush. Senator Clinton has been very clear that we, as a party, should keep the focus on Bush — these were his mistakes. Ultimately that’s very important, not just for her, but for the entire Democratic party.
Too bad for Penn that just ain't gonna happen. I have no interest in giving a pass to those Democrats who aided and abetted Bush's mistakes, and I especially have no interest in giving a pass to those who demonstrate Bushian inability to offer self-reflection and admit that mistake. It's not a question of offering an "apology". I want acknowledgment of past mistakes.
These Democrats didn't just enable Bush's war, they sat by and let the Right Wing smear machine attack those of us who waged our lonely battles to prevent this disaster from happening. And while most of the candidates in the field have come around, Hillary remains the notable exception.
Those who have admitted their mistakes are now free to train their sights on the GOP. It doesn't absolve them from their terrible judgment, but it mitigates it. While it's best to not make a mistake in the first place, it's even worse to compound that mistake by refusing to come to terms with it.
Clinton doesn't have that. And what's worse, she has pretty much lost the window of opportunity to do so. After resisting for so long, she finds herself in the thick of the presidential primary (yes, even a year out) with no room to maneuver. If she suddenly reverses course and decides that yes, she'll take personal responsibility for her vote, it'll feed into the strongest anti-Hillary narrative -- that she's a panderer and will say what is most politically expedient at the moment.
It's a sad state of affairs, but Hillary has made her bed. And while her advisors may cringe that voters demand she account for Iraq at every campaign stop, I hope she continues to get grilled on it. She deserves nothing less.
Update: Ahh, now it's Hillary advisor James Carville trying to tie Iraq into 9/11 to justify Hillary's war vote:
There was James Carville on CNN's Situation Room, desperately trying to explain why Sen.
Clinton voted for the war, even though other senators who had been given the same faulty intel she had, voted against it: "But they weren't from New York," he said. "Their state wasn't hit. They didn't have to deal with the grief of these 3,000 people."
As you recall, Hillary has already tried to make Cheney's favorite connection in trying to justify her vote:
As a senator from New York, I lived through 9/11 and am still dealing with the aftereffects.
Arguing that since New York was hit, we had to bomb the fuck out of a country that had nothing to do with it, then invade it and lose what will eventually be a trillion dollars and countless lives is really not an endearing argument.
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