Three Little Words - I WAS WRONG - may end up determining the outcome of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Those three little words are what John Edwards felt were necessary for him to say and that Hillary Clinton seems incapable of saying .
I had thought about starting this diary with a pool as to when Hillary would inevitably be forced to admit that she was wrong about her Iraq War Authorization vote in October, 2002. I was thinking of an over-under pool starting in about mid April. The pressure on Hillary is simply going to keep mounting. Right now I am not sure if she will ever be able to say the words but I think either way it will be the downfall of her presidential ambitions.
Newsweek Magazine reports that when John Edwards sat down to begin writing what eventually became the op-ed that was published in the Washington Post in November, 2005 he began with the three words I was wrong. Edwards sent the draft to his aides to look at and it came back with the three key words removed. He reinserted the phrase and sent it back and it came back again without what he felt was the critical admission. According to Edwards
"We went back and forth, back and forth," "They didn't want me to say it. They were saying I should stress that I'd been misled." The opening sentence remained. "That was the single most important thing for me to say," Edwards recalls. "I had to show how I really feel."
Hillary Clinton on the other hand, was asked on her first campaign trip to New Hampshire(reported by the press at more then one occasion) by voters to apologize for her IWR vote and her response was a repitition of what appeared to be a consulted crafted phrase. "Knowing what I know now I would never have voted for it," she said. "I have taken responsibility for my vote."
In today's New York Times Hillary is presented as offering a new explanation (which I find laughable) for her refusal to apologize that tries to make it a matter of principal for her:
"she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in."
I find it laughable because it seems to not just be me who thinks that Hillary would say almost anything if she thought it would help her win the nomination and general election.
Hillary is in a box because the longer she delays admitting she was wrong, the bigger the issue will become. She will be asked the same question at every candidates forum and also if she ever decides to submit to media interviews with the likes of Tim Russert or Chris Mathews. Her problem is that everyone knows that the Iraq War Authorization was a mistake and those who voted for it were wrong, and almost everyone knows that Hillary knows she was wrong and that she probably wishes she had just admitted she was wrong early on the way Edwards did.
Chris Mathews delivered a fairly harsh critiqued Hillary's claim that she didn't know that Bush would use the authorization to actually start the war by saying:
"Everybody in America knew we were going to war with Bush. He made it pretty clear from day one we were going to war. How come she still pretends that she didn't know he was going to war? It's like she didn't know anything about Bill and his behavior. How many times is she going to be confused by men?"
That's got to hurt, but nothing like the hurt she is going to keep getting in the polls as she continues to refuse to admit that her vote was a mistake. What she hopes will look like strength appears only as arrogant stubbornness and it just isn't a pretty sight especially after six years of Bush/Cheney.
There are some who think that his mistake in voting for the Iraq War Resolution will make John Edwards a weaker candidate then Obama because he will have to keep admitting to having been wrong. But I think he did the absolutely right thing (and perhaps only politically viable thing) by finding language to admit he was wrong and then using his ability to admit he had been wrong as an example of a positive presidential character. Eventually Barack Obama is going to face the same choice when confronted with the number of times in the last two years he has made definitive (and mistaken) positions on Iraq (ie. voting against the Kerry amendment, declaring that setting a deadline for withdrawal would be a mistake and more). How he handles those moments and whether he is able to follow Edwards' lead in simply and humbly admitting to mistakes may end up defining the 2008 presidential campaign. Three Little Words. The only possible presidential candidate who hasn't been publicly wrong at one point or another on Iraq since 2002 (besides Russ Feingold who unfortunately isn't running and Dennis Kucinich who couldn't win a national election) is Al Gore.
Cross posted at Dominant Reality