Tonight Senator Clinton won, if you can use that term about a campaign where there was no campaigning, no debating, no ground game, and where the party, for good or bad (and I think it was clearly for the worse) had stated that there would be no delegates won or lost...the majority of votes from primary voters in Florida.
Simon Rosenberg has written eloquently about the propriety of the one candidate who had the most to gain from the lack of campaigning celebrating an inevitable victory tonight. All I would add is that, as Democrats, we are the party that believes in voting and counting all the votes. At the same time, we shouldn't let anyone take advantage of that commitment and hold our party and our nomination process hostage through some kind of cynical gamesmanship.
As a party, we'll have to examine the DNC decision to penalize Florida and Michigan's delegates as the results of other states and the nomination become more clear.
But that's not what I want to address tonight...
I'd like to address a passage from a recent blog post by Ezra Klein that I hadn't read till just today that epitomizes a question that I think most Democratic primary voters have in the back of our minds about Senator Hillary Clinton and Iraq.
Due to the brouhaha over President Bill Clinton's statement about Senator Barack Obama's record on the Iraq war (a "fairytale") we've read innumerable discussions of what and when and how Barack Obama voted or spoke about the war in Iraq. What Ezra Klein did in response to this was something very simple, and, I think, profound. He turned it around. He asked the question back at Senator Clinton.
In doing so, I think Klein created a moment of clarity for me about Senator Clinton's position on the war in Iraq and crystalized, fundamentally, what I think of her leadership. Klein wrote:
Barack Obama did not step into the Senate and seek leadership in the anti-war movement. When Elizabeth Edwards said Obama's Senate record showed "a relatively complacent and go-along Senator," she wasn't necessarily wrong.
But on another [level], it's deeply misleading. It's a "Meet the Press" attack. The issue isn't the issue -- about which Obama was correct -- it's his consistency on the issue. Barack Obama was right on Iraq, and Hillary Clinton was wrong. Obama could have made a couple more speeches, but there really wasn't much he could do to divert the course of the war as a lone Senator. By contrast, there was very much Hillary Clinton, and her husband, could have done to divert the war -- and all it would have taken was exactly what Obama did. A prescient, fiercely oppositional speech during the run-up to the invasion. Nor has Clinton, who routinely promises to end the war once in office, exercised political leadership in the Senate, using either her media power or parliamentary pull to sustain a brave stand against the conflict. Instead, she has spoken of her desire to end it and, in reality, gone along with the cowed, ineffectual approach of the Senate Democrats: Register opposition, vote against bills, eventually pass spending measures that continue the war.
Wow. That says it all to me.
By contrast, there was very much Hillary Clinton, and her husband, could have done to divert the war -- and all it would have taken was exactly what Obama did. A prescient, fiercely oppositional speech during the run-up to the invasion.
That statement is so clear. Yes, all it would have taken was for the Bill and Hillary Clinton to have the judgment to do what Barack Obama did; make a bold and prescient statement about Iraq. That's a simple observation. However, there haven't been a lot of Democrats with the courage to point that reality out.
Further, Klein's statement made me search my brain for some moments from our last presidential election cycle in 2004. Moments, as someone who rallied around the Kerry campaign in John Kerry's quest to win the presidency for the Democrats, that I remembered, but that, at the time, seemed to be distractions from the greater goal at hand: electing John Kerry President of the United States.
Here's a CNN article from April of 2004, Hillary Clinton: No Regret on Iraq Vote :
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she is not sorry she voted for a resolution authorizing President Bush to take military action in Iraq despite the recent problems there but she does regret "the way the president used the authority."[snip]
To the disappointment of some antiwar liberals in her Democratic base, Clinton, the former first lady, voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution in October 2002.
"Obviously, I've thought about that a lot in the months since," she said. "No, I don't regret giving the president authority because at the time it was in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade." But she said the Bush administration's short-circuiting of the U.N. weapons inspection process didn't permit "the inspectors to finish whatever task they could have accomplished to demonstrate one way or the other what was there." She also said the failure to plan properly for the post-war period "is the hardest to understand."
So, to compound Klein's point, when the Democratic party was trying to win a national election and take back the Presidency and Congress in 2004, Senator Clinton, even then, gave an interview in which she said that she "didn't regret" giving President Bush authority to take us to war in Iraq. If I remember right, some of us bloggers (could even have been me, look it up) actually thought she was giving us an angle to attack President Bush's policies on Iraq!
Senator Clinton was not the only one. Her husband, and chief political ally, President Bill Clinton, undertook a series of interviews in advance of the publication of his autobiography "My Life" in which he discussed the war in Iraq. Here's one from June of 2004 Clinton Defends Successor's Push for War:
Former President Clinton has revealed that he continues to support President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq but chastised the administration over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
"I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over," Clinton said in a Time magazine interview that will hit newsstands Monday, a day before the publication of his book "My Life."
Clinton, who was interviewed Thursday, said he did not believe that Bush went to war in Iraq over oil or for imperialist reasons but out of a genuine belief that large quantities of weapons of mass destruction remained unaccounted for. Noting that Bush had to be "reeling" in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Clinton said Bush's first priority was to keep al Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining "chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for," Clinton said in reference to Iraq and the fact that U.N. weapons inspectors left the country in 1998.
So, those statements from 2004 bring me to my point.
The Clintons have been very insistent that we hold Barack Obama to the standards of an anti-war speech given, in advance of the invasion of Iraq, in Chicago in 2002. To take the Clinton's at their word, we shouldn't vote for someone who was opposed to the war in 2002 but then arrived in the Senate and didn't give the exact same speech.
However, as Ezra Klein points out, that begs the question. What did the Clintons do? They, not Barack Obama were in a position to change the character and nature of the U.S. invasion in 2002. And they did nothing. More than that. In the midst of the 2004 election year in which we were trying to elect a Democratic President (A guy who pledged, btw, to have our troops home in two years....which would have been over one year ago.) Bill and Hillary Clinton made statements in support of Bush's war. "No regret." "Oppose the left."
It is in that context that I find it rich and ironic that Bill and Hillary Clinton now challenge a guy who gave a speech they've never given, and probably couldn't have given and would not have given. Senator Clinton wants to serve as President, but on the critical question of Iraq, she simply cannot talk about her vote or her past. She was wrong on Iraq and has never sufficiently addressed that fact.
Barack Obama was right:
[Saddam's] a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.
I don't think Senator Clinton can answer Ezra Klein's question. What she can do is turn it around on Barack Obama. I don't think that cuts the mustard for someone seeking to be our President. Judgment matters. Iraq very much matters.
And Ezra Klein's question about leadership hangs out there as one of the burning questions of this campaign season. Can Senator Clinton answer the very same challenges she makes of Senator Obama regarding Iraq? What has she done?
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