John Kerry made a lot of mistakes during his campaign for the presidency, but one of the most pivotal ones (aside from not responding to the Swift Boat smear artists) was the answer he gave to the question about whether he would have voted for the war, knowing what the aftermath was. The man said "Yes", and collectively Democrats wanted to bean him.
Here’s the point for Democrats who voted for the war: Either you stand by your vote and think it was still the right thing to do OR you made a mistake and knowing all the evidence we have on hand right now, you would have voted against it.
YOU SIMPLY CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS. You can’t be a critic of Bush’s handling of the war and also say, well you still would have voted for the war because ONE IS DEPENDENT ON THE OTHER. If you see now how Bush has royally screwed the pooch, why in God’s name would you think your vote in 2002 was still the right call?
If anything, this mirrors the thinking of most Americans, who were not exactly gung ho about the war (something everyone forgets to mention on accident or purpose is that most people didn’t think we should go into Iraq without UN support) but now think it was a bad choice. If anything, changing your mind on Iraq humanizes a candidate and presents a strong contrast with what most now consider the worst part of President Bush: his habit of assuming he’s right, no matter the facts to the contrary.
I don’t know if it’s because she wants to "stay the course" or what, but Senator Clinton is going to let this thing blow her shot at the nomination, and the White House, if this keeps up.
Yet antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.
“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.
Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).
Here’s the thing: Democratic voters are kind of tired of making too many calculations. In 2000 many of them were not wild about Gore (I was, but I’ve always been a Gore guy), in 2004 they certainly weren’t nuts about Kerry but he wasn’t Bush. Especially among Democratic voters, there is always the hunt for the next FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton. It may not be the entire enchilada, but in 2008 the odds-on winner is going to be the candidate Democrats swoon for in the way Republicans swooned for Reagan and Bush II (and didn’t for Bush I or Dole). If you’re Hillary Clinton, I gotta think the last thing you want to do is give them the last little shove that pushes them into the Obama or Edwards camp simply because you want to be – let’s be real here – stubborn about the vote you made in 2002.
And that’s what it looks like Sen. Clinton is doing here. For the smartest, most well organized campaign out there at this point it looks like a dumb move to me.
Hillary has really crossed a bridge with that statement. In essence, she’s saying she doesn’t give a damn about the strong anti-war constituency in the Democratic party. But more importantly, and this to me is the major point here – she’s in essence saying she’s not sorry for the 3,000 plus lives we’ve lost in this dumb Iraq debacle. It is sad that she feels that way.
She’s hardened my resolve against her and God knows I was trying hard to like her. I just can’t do it anymore.
I wasn’t voting for her to begin with, so don’t put me down as a Hillary fan. I wonder if this might not work out better for her than you (and Kos and others) think, though. One of the biggest criticisms of Hillary is that she is too calculated about her positions on issues, never going with her own opinion but rather with opinion polls. Ironically, this incredibly calculated stance on her part might make the average person respect her for sticking to a position, even or especially an unpopular one. Hillary’s not stupid, and neither is Bill. There’s no question they’ve thought this all the way through. So if the folks in “the NetRoots” want to take her to task for it, they ought to make damn sure everyone knows how calculated this move it. Portraying it as stubborn disregard of public opinion plays right into her hands.
? for president?
just a terrible assessment by oliver. if hillary apologizes then she’ll be labeled a flip flopper, a waffler who was for the war before she was against it. that was the label that cost kerry the swing voters and the 2004 election.
That’s great, OW.
Let’s just let the GOP slimers sit this campaign out. We’ll spread their phony “facts” about our candidates for them.
Enough with the analysis of what Ms. Clinton hasn’t said. OK, she won’t call her vote a mistake. Neither will she call it a calamity, a boo-boo, a disaster, or the act of her evil twin.
What does she say about it?
Step away from the so-called conventional wisdom, OW. That’s what you do best.
Or try it this way, OW.
Let’s go into the main event with a candidate who voted to send soldiers into battle and then later, after 3,000 soldiers were killed, said “Oopsie! My bad!”
Yeah, that’s the kind of person voters want in the White House.
brif: Either she made a mistake voting for the war or she didn’t. Kerry “flip flopped” because he said he was right to vote for the war but he was still against it. Only one of those things can be true – either your vote was wrong or it was right.
Quaker: It would be at least an acknowledgment of the “my bad”, wouldn’t it. Sure I agree with her that the most important element is what’s going forward, but when you consider that she’s kind of out there alone on this position in the field right now, the idea that it’s off base is kinda DOA. I’m all for party unity patty cake, but not one year before the first primary. I bet most Democratic voters would have liked to have seen John Kerry perform under pressure before the 2004 primaries before voting so much based on his – admittedly stellar – biography, no?
Then here’s all you need to take away from Patrick Healy’s awful, awful reporting:
“For the life of me I don’t understand why she can’t say, ‘I made a mistake, I was misled, the country was misled, the intelligence was manipulated,’ ” said Robert M. Shrum, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry in 2004.
You’ve made the argument yourself that a winning candidate should do the opposite of whatever Shrum says.
BTW, Healy’s article is just the latest in a long string of hack jobs. Ms. Clinton stands firm on her previous position, and how does Healy paint it? As a politically calculated “new answer” on the question of Iraq.
Reporting just doesn’t get anymore scripted and phony.
Rob wrote:
One of the biggest criticisms of Hillary is that she is too calculated about her positions on issues, never going with her own opinion but rather with opinion polls.
Now see? This is what I’m talking about.
“One of the biggest criticisms of Hillary”? From who? “Politically calculated” is the pundit script, the role that the press corps has assigned to Ms. Clinton. No matter what she does or says, the script says “Hillary is too calculating!”
Just for the record, I’m not sold on Ms. Clinton as a candidate. I’m not very keen on the idea of almost 30 years of uninterrupted governance from just two families (or more, if another Bush pops up after Ms. Clinton).
But we Dems whine when the press treats our candidates unfairly. There’s no reason for us to do the same.
You are right about swooning. If you go with the one who makes you swoon chances are some republicans and indies will as well and that is how you win.
Hillary is looking for the infamous 3rd way. It’s always the 3rd way with the Clintons and the DLC. That is how you lose. Because you lose your identity as a dem.
Hillary would be a disaster for this country and I keep hoping the majority of dems will see this.
Besides, she cannot get some republicans or indies to vote for her and that is how we’d lose the election if she is the nominee
Let’s look at what Clinton has said regarding her vote:
Okay, so unlike Kerry’s boneheaded statement that he was essentially just like Bush but smarter, Hillary seems to be saying that she doesn’t need to apologize for essentially being tricked into voting for the war. On one level, this makes some degree of sense. Congress has to act on what it believes to be good faith intelligence and analysis from the White House. Just like a computer, apparently, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. So it follows that she feels that the blame, and subsequent need for apology, falls on Bush, and not her.
A lot of people, and especially those on the left, were against the war from minute one and opposed any invasion. Red flags were popping up all over the place. Afghanistan was still far from secure, bin Laden was still on the loose, the 9/11 hijackers were known to have been predominantly from Saudi Arabia, not Iraq, there was no solid evidence of any WMDs and the U.N. weapons inspectors were being rather blatantly ignored (one of Bush’s flat out, easily documented lies was about the weapons inspectors not being allowed back into Iraq), the loud objections of people like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the predictions of massive instability and civil war, and so on. At the very least, there was enough to give any congressman (or woman) pause, but many just charged ahead and gave Bush his blank check anyway. The same happened with the Patriot Act, with many later revealing that they never even had time to read the bill. Then why the hell vote for it? Of course, the 9/11 hype/fear machine was in full swing in those days, and no one wanted to be seen as weak on terror or labeled a traitor. Clinton, along with many other Dems, cast the expedient and ostensibly “popular” vote and cast aside her constitutional obligations to act as a check on the Presidency. In hindsight, her vote seems particularly calculated since it was widely assumed she planned a run at the White House, possibly as early as 2004. It’s impossible to know if she was, in fact, voting as much for her presidential aspirations as for any expansion of the President’s authority to take military action abroad, but the perception is definitely there.
Additionally, pissing on Edwards and Obama makes her look petty. Such a statement really calls into question her judgment as a Senator. How does she explain being given the same evidence as senator Obama, but coming to a very different, and very wrong, conclusion? How can she think that coming across as a stubborn hard ass makes her compare favorably with Edwards? If nothing else, she needs to understand that the press plans to “Gore” her as they did Kerry (and attempted to do with her husband). Pundit clowns like Chris Matthews are already pitching tents over the opportunity to take her down, continually leveraging the issue of her war vote to define her and her campaign. Clearly, her efforts to paint her vote as competent but misinformed don’t seem to be winning many people over.
Like the wizard said, the time came to choose between what was right, and what was easy.
A sizable number of people think she went with easy, and that perception could well sink her candidacy.
In hindsight, her vote seems particularly calculated since it was widely assumed she planned a run at the White House, possibly as early as 2004.
Great Scot!
That’s an impressive demonstration of mind reading. Her vote “seems calculated” because other people assumed she would run for President someday?
As long as you’re plumbing the depths of Ms. Clinton’s secret thoughts, give us the whole scoop, willya?
How did she hope to benefit from her “calculated” vote? Did she hope to inherit this war? Or was she planning to start one of her own?
Really, the Clinton haters on the right look like amateurs compared to the fantasists in our own ranks.
Wow, Quaker, normally your pretty reasonable, but you’re reaching here.
I wrote, “It’s impossible to know if she was, in fact, voting as much for her presidential aspirations as for any expansion of the President’s authority to take military action abroad, but the perception is definitely there.”
In other words, only Hillary knows her reasons for voting the way she did, but the idea that she doesn’t do anything unless it will advance her political career is out there and it is POTENT.
Putting aside all the Time/CNN polling and the obvious blather from Right wing sites, there was plenty of speculation about a possible Clinton run in 2004 despite her adamant denials of any designs on the White House at the time. Here are a couple of links demonstrating my enormous telepathic skills
CNN: Will Hillary Clinton Run for President in 2004?
2004: Wishful Thinking?
The latest Hillary-for-president scenario
How did she hope to benefit from her vote? She could very well have believed that such a vote would bolster her credibility among voters concerned that Dems were weak on terror. The same voters that went on to vote Bush into a second term (if you discount Ohio, anyway). It’s not reality we are concerned with here anyway, but how her vote may be perceived. People seem to have slipped into a fantasy world were it was always fashionable for Dems to fight to declare who is the most anti-war, or at least anti-Iraq war. In 2002 a large percentage of the public thought going into Iraq was a good idea and 9/11 was just a year old, so how can anyone in their right mind ask what some senator, any senator, hoped to get from voting to enable Bush’s Iraq adventure. The vote to authorize the use of military force at Bush’s discretion was arguably the most important of her career and she got it WRONG. Many, many Dems did. We know why the GOP voted the way they did, and certainly Joe Lieberman needs no explaining, but what was Clinton’s thinking? So far all I can get out of her statements is that she was misled, duped, bamboozled, smackledorfed. If you read the text of her speech from October, 2002, it is apparent that she was deeply conflicted about voting for the authorization to use force, but one part caught my eye in particular:
If that isn’t the definition of irony, I don’t know what is, for that is ultimately exactly what her vote proved to be for.
Regardless, my post was hardly an attack on Clinton or the work of a “fantasist.” I simply argued that there is a perception, bolstered I think by the seemingly overt hostility toward Obama and Edwards, that she is being hard headed about the subject of her war vote. I even quoted her directly, showing that she has explained her vote as the product of a bad faith presidency (I believe there is a quote from her to the effect that had she known then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have voted the way she did because there wouldn’t have been any vote at all). But I think this is pretty obvious to anyone who read my WHOLE post and didn’t cherry pick the odd sentence fragment to post stupid flame bait.
This is all ’symbol’ BS. Whats at work here is lots and lots of emotion and not much thought. Ms Clinton wants to be president of all the country. She must thereby appear and act presidential. Apologizing to the extremist wing of her party for a vote she thought was the right thing to do at the time would be weak and unpresidential and stamp her as an also ran.
She must leave her Iraq options open. Shes knows, I know, we all know that if she wins the nomination, the left will go with her. Because the option would be a Republican Pres. and that they would hate a lot more than anything else.
Absolutely agree OW, you cannot have it both ways.
HEr bigger problem though may be alienating a key Democratic Primary voting bloc, a bloc that is limited in size but sizable in influence and message reinforcement. This is not a very smart move from HRC. This has the DLC boys written all over it and she will look mighty silly when she realizes she is going to need those exact same people in 8-12 months. By then support for this war may be running in the low 20 percent of the population leaving HRC clinging to the mythic “war was wrong but my vote was not a mistake” narrative. bad move from the usually savvy HRC team.
I disagree with many, many things Dugger writes.
But not this:
Exactly correct, sir.
I simply argued that there is a perception, bolstered I think by the seemingly overt hostility toward Obama and Edwards, that she is being hard headed about the subject of her war vote.
“There is a perception”?
Why not just say “Questions swirl”? That’s just the sort of passive-voice nonsense that pundits and the press corps use to trash our candidates and it works really well. You can say anything–anything at all–about a Democrat without any source or attribution and even “liberal” writers will look the other way.
“There is a perception”? Who holds this perception? How did they acquire it? Is it based in fact? Or is it just a given about Ms. Clinton’s “character” that writers and pundits use to frame their standard tales?
Or in this case, go so far as to spread the notion.
Since you’ve gone to the trouble to look up Ms. Clinton’s 2002 speech, perhaps you could also remind us what the White House was saying at the time.
Cut: “Or in this case, go so far as to spread the notion.”
Paste: at the end of paragraph 3.
This smacks of a profound double standard.
“For years the left has made a point of making Bush’s lack of public contrition over Iraq a constant talking point.” Do I need to support that contention, now, or will you just accept it as fact? “Bush is dangerously stubborn.” How about that, need substantiation, or is that a given at this point?
Now we have reached the point where stubborn silence is being held up as a virtue. Wasn’t Kerry widely criticized that he was slow to respond to attacks and tended to put his foot in his mouth when he did? “A sizable portion of the press and public see Hillary as being calculating and cold.” Does this really need to be qualified to death? This whole thread is about Hillary’s image. For the 8 years of her husband’s presidency she was a lighting rod for criticism from the right because she had the audacity to speak her voice on public policy rather than play the role of demure background prop. When she threw her hat into the ring for the Senate, the possibility of a run at the White House became a regular staple of Beltway chatter.
The Daily Howler, who some people seem to be practically channeling in this thread, makes a religious habit of eviscerating the pundit core and its lax relationship with reality, particularly were Gore was concerned and now with Hillary. Fortunately they usually recognize that the problem lies in selective quotation or flat out avoidance of a candidate’s words.
I didn’t do any of that and even supported my contentions with direct unedited quotes.
Hillary seems to be gambling that taking a hard line on the subject of her war vote may play out in her favor and may squelch some measure of future criticism, though I doubt it. The subject is a major vulnerability and her team has to know it. Ironically, it wouldn’t surprise me if some corners of the right wouldn’t love for Hillary to win the nomination. Of all the candidates, she certainly has the most chance of galvanizing the conservative base and getting them into the voting booth.
There are certainly Hillary “fantasists” gunning for her and prepared to harp on her every word. There are also Hillary apologists who seem to be working overtime to treat any criticism or even discussion of her candidacy as grounds for immediate reprisal.
Since you bring up the Howler, I recommend today’s edition.
Hillary apologists who seem to be working overtime to treat any criticism or even discussion of her candidacy as grounds for immediate reprisal.
That won’t be me. As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m don’t much care for the idea of such long-term governance by just two families.
However, it still drives me nuts to see people who sincerely want to see a Democrat in the White House trash the current frontrunner with the laziest standard scripts.
Sure, you quoted Ms. Clinton. But you can only say that her words “seem” to show that she’s calculating.
Please, I’ll let this drop. Just show me one example of Ms. Clinton being “calculating” that doesn’t rely on mind reading.