One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq...
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.
The very next paragraph cuts right to the point:
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).
Gee, ya think?
I'm not going to mince words: Clinton's campaign just passed a point of no return which it will likely come to rue in the coming months.
The issue is only incidentally about apologizing for her decision to stand with the militarists in 2002. As Kos comments with eminent good sense: "I don't want her to apologize. I want her to say, 'I made a mistake.' Edwards did it. Just about every other Democrat who idiotically trusted this president and supported the war has done it. Had Hillary done this last year, the issue would be moot." It is far more crucially about her relationship with the Democratic party's grassroots -the activists on which any nomination campaign is vitally dependent for donations and especially volunteers. Clinton just told a great many of them, already unhappy with her obtuseness on this issue, to basically pound dirt.
And they will -right to Obama or Edwards (as she herself helpfully suggests), or possibly Richards.
The best part is how the Clinton campaign has tried to justify this move. One campaign aide quoted anonymously in the Times piece, who obviously lobbied for it, offers this rationale:
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."
The incredible irony here is that Clinton is taking advice from the same people who led the Democrats over a cliff in 2000 and 2004 and, even better, who are now using their past failures to justify adopting the the same strategy in 2008.
The problem that Gore and Kerry had wasn't that they "flip flopped" on national security, but rather that they took their counsel from the so called "centrists" in the party establishment who held that "mainstream" America had an inherent conservative bias and that the Democrats had to finesse rather than accentuate policy differences with Republicans or risk political marginalization. In particular the centrists, led by the Democratic Leadership Council, argued that it would be political suicide for to listen to the party's progressive wing and offer an alternative to voters that differed sharply from Republican positions on tax policy, foreign affairs, health care, and so on. The result was that Gore chose as his running mate arch centrist Joe Lieberman -who (in case you haven't been keeping up with current events) is now an outcast from his own party- and Kerry ran a campaign that focused on his supposed national security bona fides to the virtual exclusion of everything else.
Both lost.
At least Gore learned from his mistakes and backed Howard Dean, the outside the beltway darling of the party's progressives, in 2004, over his own former running mate. Not that it prevented the DLC, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, from destroying Dean's candidacy so that the nomination could be secured for a safe, "electable" politician like Kerry.
By contrast in 2006, with the centrist hold on the party weakened by spectacular back to back failures, the Democrats wrested back control of Congress in no small part (centrist attempts to rain on their parade notwithstanding) by putting forward candidates who were unapologetic about the differences between a Democrat and a Republican.
Now Clinton appears to have fallen under the spell of the same quacks in whom Gore and Kerry placed their trust (not necessarily surprisingly, since her husband was closely identified with the centrist element of the party). This is the same timid, mealy mouthed "we can't afford to stray too far from the Republicans" talk we've heard in the previous campaigns. The difference is that whereas in 2000 playing hardball with the Republicans admittedly entailed a calculated element of risk, in 2007, with Bush's approval in free fall and his presidency visibly crumbling, disassociating yourself from this trainwreck would seem to be a no brainer. For the love of the Almighty, if this isn't the right time to proclaim yourself the anti-Bush when is?
And the ultimate irony? In the end Kerry's attempt to out-Republican the Republicans on national security didn't prevent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth from dragging his reputation through the mud. Newsflash Hillary: these people play for all the marbles, and they play to win. Sure you can innoculate yourself against the accusation of being a "flip flopper" -at the expense of alienating a large part of the party base- but you can't hide from the slime attacks that are coming as surely as night follows day.
They'll just find another angle to work. It's what they do.
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