"Admitting" A Mistake

If I may say something nice about Hillary Clinton for a minute, I think things like this attack from Will Saletan are kind of unfair:

Five years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. So did I. It took me four years to admit this was a mistake. I've been wondering when Clinton would admit it. Now, from campaign insiders quoted in the New York Times, comes the answer: never. As she told voters a few days ago: "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."

This is an amazingly stupid and arrogant position. If she sticks to it, it will probably kill her candidacy. And it should.

From where I sit, the issue here isn't that Clinton, unlike Saletan (or me) isn't willing to "admit" that supporting the war resolution was a mistake. The issue is that she doesn't think it was a mistake and she doesn't want to pretend otherwise. Clinton's executive power theory of why she votes the right way ("She believes in executive authority and Congressional deference, her advisers say, and is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief") seems very plausible to me. When liberals are trying to get conservatives to worry about executive power one line a lot of us use is you realize Hillary Clinton may be president some day, right? But from Clinton's point of view, she may be president some day. What's more, as someone who was First Lady for much longer than she'd been a Senator at the time of the vote, it's natural that she would have a great deal of appreciation for the president's-eye-view take on the matter.

This isn't to say that voting for the war was the right thing to do. But there's every reason to think she thinks it was the right thing to do. She's not refusing to "admit" anything; she's just saying what she thinks.

Comments

Well, that's a scarier picture of HRC than I previously had. Thanks.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on February 22, 2007 08:49 AM

Is it worth pointing out that the resolution actually supplid the president with the authority to use force, if other avenues had been exhausted? Look- I've been opposed to the war from the start, I'm furious about what happened, and I'm angry at the Congress for not standing up to it when it happened. You certainly can criticize the Senate and whoever else for trusting that Bush would exhaust other avenues, or that he would administer the war competently. All of that is true. But I do think it's important to remember what the actual wording of the resolution was.

Of course, I suppose it's true that everyone knew, at that point, that we were just going to attack.

Posted by: Freddie on February 22, 2007 08:52 AM

Right, it's her theory of executive power that's stupid and arrogant, not to mention unconstitutional and dangerous.

Posted by: Gary Sugar on February 22, 2007 08:54 AM

The vote was probably the right call, except in retrospect. The best course of action was to present a credible threat of force, forcing iraq to accept strict inspections.

Of course, the really prescient call was to follow the GWB exception rule, and vote in what ever way most ties GWB's hands - but that was less clear at the time. Remember at this point, GWB was probably not even in the bottom five US Presidents, much less in a class by himself at the bottom. It was possible to see that Bush was going to screw everything up -- many people did -- but it would have been the correct vote if any of the other serious candidates for President was actually President, so the vote, as bad as it turned out to be, was not that bad at the time.

Posted by: theCoach on February 22, 2007 08:57 AM

It is really difficult to unpack the whole 2002 vote issue since the vote was not to go to war, it was to give the President the power to threaten war if Saddam failed to comply with the UN requirements.

Since Hilary was backing the UN route as an alternative to war the resolution said exactly what she was arguing for. The only way that she could vote against the resolution would be if she knew for certain that Bush had absolutely no intention of good faith.

Of course now we know and suspected then that Bush was not acting in good faith. But acting on the suspicion of bad faith is exactly what the Republicans had been doing when they controlled Congress.

Bush went to Congress with a particular set of statements that turned out to be deliberate lies. The 2002 resolution was not a cause of the Iraq fiasco, Bush was.

A more significant question is whether Hilary would vote the same way again now that Bush has been proven to be a liar beyond the possibility of doubt.

Posted by: PHB on February 22, 2007 08:58 AM

If Clinton really does believe in a massively powerful executive to which Congress must always defer, to the point of justifying a vote for a clearly fraudulent and devastating war, then she's manifestly unqualified to be president and her campaign has to be stopped dead at all costs. But Yglesias is being unfair to Saletan in claiming that Saletan is being unfair to Clinton. From the original Times piece:

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton believes that reversing course on her vote would invite the charge of flip-flopping that damaged Mr. Kerry or provoke the kind of accusations of political expediency that hung over Al Gore in 2000 and her and her husband, President Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, several advisers said. She has argued to associates in private discussions that Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry lost, in part, because they could not convince enough Americans that they were resolute on national security, the associates said.

Mrs. Clinton’s image as a strong leader, in turn, is critical to her hopes of becoming the nation’s first female president. According to one adviser, her internal polling indicates that a high proportion of Democrats see her as strong and tough, both assets particularly valuable to a female candidate who is seeking to become commander in chief. Apologizing might hurt that image, this adviser said.

This certainly suggests that it's not merely Clinton's ideological devotion to a near-dictatorial executive that prevents her from apologizing, but political calculation - calculation driven by the Rovian belief that strength is best projected by the refusal to admit error, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Posted by: Christmas on February 22, 2007 09:21 AM

Here's where not reading the Daily Howler bites you in the ass. Clinton has said -- years ago, and repeatedly in recent weeks, though the Post and Times routinely omit the relevant quotes -- that she wouldn't have voted for the war if she had known then what she knew now.

So, presumably, she does think it was a mistake. Oh well.

Posted by: marc h. on February 22, 2007 09:23 AM

The comments above are excellent. Clinton's position is consistent. She does think in retrospect that it was a mistake because Bush didn't act in good faith. However, she doesn't think it was a mistake in prospect for the reasons given above.

That having been said, I think politically its a big mistake for her not to just admit it was a big mistake, period.

It seems to be that the Iraq war vote gives Obama a decisive edge, both politically and substantiatively over the other two.

Posted by: Jim W on February 22, 2007 09:28 AM

> It is really difficult to unpack the whole
> 2002 vote issue since the vote was not to
> go to war, it was to give the President
> the power to threaten war if Saddam failed
> to comply with the UN requirements.

If Ms. Clinton was not perceptive or shrewd enough to see that such a vote was all that Bush/Cheney needed to go to war _regardless of subsequent events_, why is she considered perceptive or shrewd enough to be President?

Cranky

Posted by: Cranky Observer on February 22, 2007 09:42 AM

Clinton says she would have voted differently "if I knew then what I know now." Well, hell, that just means if she were clairvoyant she wouldn't have voted for the war. What she refuses to say is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice lied. Edwards has come out and said it: I was misled. Clinton hasn't. This the important point - not the word mistake, not the theory of executive power. Clinton refuses to call Bush a liar.

Why? Because she's running a campaign designed to attract the centrist, low-information, undecided voter. She doesn't want to alienate the people who voted for Bush last time. She thinks she can run on health care and Social Security and ignore the war. She's looking for Sister Souljah moments to prove that she's not tied to the left wing of the party. This is a campaign that will alienate the Democratic base and the majority of Americans who have turned against the war. It's a strategy that is guaranteed to lose.

Posted by: Bloix on February 22, 2007 09:51 AM

But from Clinton's point of view, she may be president some day. What's more, as someone who was First Lady for much longer than she'd been a Senator at the time of the vote, it's natural that she would have a great deal of appreciation for the president's-eye-view take on the matter.

Well, sure. Her view now is the view most of the Democrats had from 1995 through 2001. I mean, where exactly were the Democrats in Congress yelling and screaming that Clinton's Kosovo campaign was illegal because it wasn't authorized? They were pretty few and far between. (I, BTW, supported Clinton then, since I an a supporter of executive power.) And where were the Democrats in Congress when Clinton sidestepped the Senate and appointed Bill Lann Lee? I don't remember any Democrat Senators standing up for Congress after the Judiciary Committee refused to recommend him.

It's just that Hillary has maintained her position, whereas the rest of the left switched on a dime as soon as Bush was elected President.

Posted by: Al on February 22, 2007 09:52 AM

It seems to me that the issue is what she would do in a situation similar to the the Iraq situation in 2002--iffy WMD intelligence about a country that is not a direct threat to US interests, where many are counseling that chaos will be the result in a strategic region--and her answer is that she would authorize war. I don't know how dissimilar that is to the issues surrounding Iran, either now or in the near future; I worry that the answer is "not much." And I'm not overly impressed by the claim that you need to double-dare blind-bluff Hussein, etc., but not go to war.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on February 22, 2007 09:52 AM

It is really difficult to unpack the whole 2002 vote issue since the vote was not to go to war, it was to give the President the power to threaten war if Saddam failed to comply with the UN requirements.

This is a ridiculously naive reading of the 2002 vote, and any senator who honestly accepted this argument at face value at the time should be deeply ashamed of himself. The Bush administration had been publicly agitating for war with Iraq since at least the state of the union address that year, and had even made the claim that Bush didn't have to go to Congress at all for authorization (making the argument that he had the authority from the vote on the previous Gulf War). It was fairly clear that this was an administration looking for a war, and that this was a vote for a war. To see it as merely an authorization for a "credible threat" is to ignore the previously statements of administration figures from Richard Perle to Paul Wolfowitz to Andrew Card to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush.

None of this was all that difficult to discern - nor was the fact that Iraq was not a threat to American security, nor was the notion that an invasion and occupation would likely be a disaster. Al Gore wasn't fooled; nor were Feingold, Graham, Reed, Jeffords, Kennedy, Boxer, Byrd, or a host of others in both the Senate and the House. Hell, Lincoln Chafee got this one right. This isn't just a case of Bush selling a war with lies; it's also a matter of the men and women who chose to believe those lies when they should've known better. Clinton was one of those, and she's still one of those. In a better world she would've lost her job and gotten drummed out of politics forever. The least we can expect of this one is that she won't be promoted to the most powerful office in the world for fucking over her country.

Posted by: Christmas on February 22, 2007 09:58 AM

One flaw I see with Matt's argument is that, even if Hillary really does believe in executive power, why does she have to maintain 100% consistency with that view now? Anyone who is that honest shouldn't be president.

The more convincing explanation is the one given by Bloix above (as well as Alterman on bloggingheads.tv), that she is acting out of political calculation. Let's hope it costs her the nomination.

Posted by: Jim W on February 22, 2007 09:58 AM

The common wisdom at the time here in Europe was that Saddam Hussein was very clearly a paper tiger, that inspections were accomplishing the goal of containing his WMD ambitions, and that most of the United States was engaged in a collective, paranoid delusion. From that perspective, the War Powers act of 2002 was certainly a mistake.

But, I've yet to see a coherent explanation of why voting for authorizing the use of force as a last resort (which is very different from voting for war) was a mistake for someone who was in the grips of that collective delusion, ie. someone who honestly believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD, was successfully developing a nuclear capability, and was also successfully thwarting the inspections and sanctions system designed to contain him.

Hillary has already admitted that she's come to see that the narrative the Bush administration had constructed with regard to Saddam Hussein was false. But at the time, she believed it, like most of Congress and a good part of the country. She was also probably influenced by the common wisdom of the Clinton administration, which must not have been overly at odds with Bush's. In light of which, the War Powers vote was not at all a mistake, and calling it one would be a dishonest and irresponsible act of pandering.

Bad judgment, yes. Mistake, no. the two are not mutually exclusive.

Posted by: Headline Junky on February 22, 2007 10:05 AM

Here's where not reading the Daily Howler bites you in the ass.

Somerby is a crank. He's gotten so used to reflexively defending the Clintons from genuine smears that he can't tell when she's being attacked for something she deserves. All of Clinton's statements on the war have been carefully delivered. She's never said her vote was a mistake. She's never said she was sorry, she's never said she was wrong. Her stance has been that if we'd known then what we knew now, "there wouldn't have been a vote." And if I could fly to work I'd save a lot of money on subway passes. But it doesn't address the fact that plenty of people voted against the war with the same meager knowledge that Hillary Clinton apparently had. So if people like Howard Dean and Russ Feingold - and Barack Obama, who she's running against for the nomination - got it right with the same information, why can't she just say "I was wrong"?

Posted by: Christmas on February 22, 2007 10:06 AM

"the rest of the left switched on a dime as soon as Bush was elected President."

interestingly enough this turns out to be the proper policy in retrospect. Bush, because of either malevelance or incompetence turns everything he oversees to massive failure. Daniel Davies (dsquared) I believe hit on this policy before the war.

Posted by: theCoach on February 22, 2007 10:09 AM

interestingly enough this turns out to be the proper policy in retrospect.

I think it's fine to take a flexible approach to these things - support executive power when your executive is in power, be against executive power when the other side's executive is in power. But others may want to take a more principled approach - support executive power (or the opposite) regardless of whose executive is in power at the moment.

Posted by: Al on February 22, 2007 10:13 AM

But others may want to take a more principled approach - support executive power (or the opposite) regardless of whose executive is in power at the moment.

Here, "principled" is used to mean "slavish" or "simplistic"?

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on February 22, 2007 10:15 AM

someone who honestly believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD, was successfully developing a nuclear capability, and was also successfully thwarting the inspections and sanctions system designed to contain him.

I don't believe the claim about "developing a nuclear capability." My impression is the primary point of the widespread and constant use of "WMD" was to avoid having to address or analyze the likelihood of a nuclear threat. Did anyone think he had a serious nuke program going? As I recall, the most people were willing to claim was that he would have such a program come tomorrow.

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on February 22, 2007 10:20 AM

There are a few separate questions here and I think we all get tangled up with respect to where Hillary Clinton stands on each one.

1) At the time, knowing what she knew, she thought and still thinks she made the right call. If she were president, facing the same situation (with good, un-manipulated intelligence), she would have wanted the same authority
2) In retrospect, knowing that there were no WMDs, the whole war was a big mistake. This is the "there wouldn't have been a vote" scenario---if good intelligence to that effect had escaped the administration, they wouldn't have gotten their war. Clinton has made carefully worded statements to this effect.
3) In retrospect, knowing that Bush is a Class-A Fuck-Up, giving him authority to do anything ever was a big mistake. I don't think we will ever get Hillary Clinton to affirm this principle.

There's an interesting snag between (1) and (2), which is: what is good intelligence and how much is enough? I suspect Clinton's sympathies lie with the administration here too. Although they clearly didn't follow Best Practices in handling and interpreting the intelligence, there is a vast gray area between a "slam dunk" case and "ambiguous, but cause for grave concern." And as much as you don't want Doug Feith running a Intelligence Analysis Amateur Hour, you don't want every last Congressman second-guessing you either.

Posted by: Chris Conway on February 22, 2007 10:37 AM

Al, I believe "in principle" that parents should be allowed to raise their children according to their own values. If I see a father beating his child with a tire iron, I modify my principle and (carefully) intervene. The next time you want to invoke the principle of executive power, think of Bush beating the Constitution to death with a tire iron.

Posted by: Chris Conway on February 22, 2007 10:40 AM

"WMD" is a mistake, too. We do not, in fact, care that much about chem and bio weapons as serious threats to the US. There was a WaPo article just before the war addressing these issues with some non-gov. experts in the relevant areas, IIRC. It remains important to me that my President be able to distinguish real threats from things that are just super-scary to him, b/c, well, he's the sort of guy who runs to Nebraska in a crisis. If HRC's a candy-ass, too, I'd like to know that. (Her comments tying her support for Bush's Iraq policy to "living through 9/11" do not fill me with confidence.)

Posted by: SomeCallMeTim on February 22, 2007 10:43 AM

The real underlying problem for Hillary is the (correct, I think) perception that her entire Senate career has been calibrated to appeal to the greatest number of Iowa Democrats/general electorate voters.

In the context of her repeated and transparent pandering to the American Middle (flag burning, video game banning, etc), her vote for the war fits in very well with the "She'll do anything to win an election" idea.

The SNL joke that had her saying "If I knew then what I know now, that I could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it," gets it mostly right, at least in the minds of primary voters.

Posted by: Ben on February 22, 2007 10:54 AM

I'm increasingly of the view that the real schmucks in regards to the 2002 vote weren't the Democrats who voted the wrong way, but the leadership that allowed Bush to orchestrate the vote in the first place. I mean, you have Bush saying "Gosh, I just can't negotiate with Saddam for the next several months unless he knows I have the support of Congress, so we've just got to have a vote on the hypothetical use of force right before the Congressional election." Was it really so hard for Tom Daschle or whoever to call bullshit on this?

Posted by: Steve on February 22, 2007 10:55 AM

Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were two of the worst people to be leading the Dems in '02-'03, and their subsequent political deaths did the party a great deal of good.

There's a great shot in Farhenheit 9/11 where Michael Moore is doing a voice over about Congressional impotence in the face of Bush's drive to war, and he cuts to a shot of Dachle and Gephardt sitting quitely and staring at a telephone, like the proverbial fat chicks waiting for the starting quarterback to call up and ask them to prom. All you need to know about Dems in Congress post-9/11.

Posted by: Ben on February 22, 2007 11:04 AM

I agree, I wish that Senator Clinton hadn't voted for the war in the beginning but the important thing is that if she is voted in that she'll get us out. I am grateful there are presidential candidates who are against the war. However, I hope that the candidates are also willing to spend some of the resources from the war on real issues such as global poverty. According to the Borgen Project, only .16% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid annually.

Posted by: marie2 on February 22, 2007 12:10 PM

It goes without saying that the opinions of magazine columnists about matters of national security and foreign policy are of about the same degree of importance as members of the United States Senate so it is therefore quite reasonable and not the least bit self-important for said columnists to congratulate themselves for their proud moments of Taking Responsibility.

Posted by: Linus on February 22, 2007 12:16 PM

But the post misses a larger point: Hillary made several points in her speech about what she was voting for -- leverage for the U.N., non-preemptive war.

It's one thing to say she was duped or her vote was taken in bad confidence. But she never said that at the time, when it might have made even a small difference. She never said, when the inspectors were short-circuited or when it became clear that Bush was hell-bent on war no matter what, that he had misused the authority.

That is, she didn't say this until it became beyond clear that the war was not going well and, more to the point, it would hurt her in the primary race.

Posted by: Edgar Blint on February 22, 2007 12:41 PM

Well, and the point is, what you say in your speech means nothing anyway. You can't vote to give the President unconditional authority and then make a nice speech for the Congressional Record in which you lay out all kinds of implicit conditions. And if Hillary had spoken out in the spring of 2003 and said, "Wait, this isn't what I voted for," she would have just looked like a fool, since it clearly WAS what she voted for, albeit not what she may have hoped for.

What's amazing to me is that the whole "I only voted to give the President the authority" argument was pretty well shown to be a loser by Kerry in 2004. Why would anyone go with it again?

Posted by: Steve on February 22, 2007 01:06 PM

It is unambiguously clear that Hillary Clinton is held to an entirely different standard than other politicians. Not only on Iraq but on virtually every issue, the first instinct of the media in general (on both the right and the left) is to highlight her so-called "inauthentic" and/or "insincere" and/or "arrogant" motivations and never, to actually think she might believe what she is saying. Is she REALLY more ambitious or arrogant than any other presidential candidate??

I had lunch in midtown recently with a friend and we were chatting about the candidates. He insisted how he hated Hillary for the usual reasons (carpetbagger, insincere, ambitious). When I asked why he thought that, he could not say for sure other than it was something he believed.

Take a look at the next news article or segment on Hillary. Look how often an inevitable unnamed aide or pundit refers to the "real" motivation behind what she actually says or does.

It's a pernicious smear and Saletan is an unwitting accomplice.

Posted by: Paul S on February 22, 2007 01:08 PM

"The issue is that she doesn't think it was a mistake and she doesn't want to pretend otherwise."

I agree.

It would be wrong for her to offer an apology when she thinks in her heart she acted in good faith.

She believes that given the assurances of Bush that he would use the resolution as a bargaining chip to get full inspections and go to war as a last resort and the scary intel provided to Congress she made a reasonable decision.

It would also be ridiculous for any Dem to apologize for the Iraq war when Bush/Cheney themselves have offered no apologies.

Posted by: DonB on February 22, 2007 01:12 PM

"It is unambiguously clear that Hillary Clinton is held to an entirely different standard than other politicians."

Why aren't reporters demanding that Bush apologize for all the lies he told to get the country into this ruinous war.

I don't think any Democrat should offer an apology. The blame lies with Bush. It is his fuck up.

Posted by: DonB on February 22, 2007 01:15 PM

"Is she REALLY more ambitious or arrogant than any other presidential candidate??"

Accusations of being ambitious is a misogynist attack. Geffen was attacking her as being ambitious in the Dowd piece.

Aren't they all ambitious? Isn't Obama or Mitt or McCain or Rudy?

It doesn't seem to bother people that all these male politicians running are ambitious. But they are bothered that the female candidate is ambitious.

Posted by: DonB on February 22, 2007 01:22 PM

It is unambiguously clear that Hillary Clinton is held to an entirely different standard than other politicians. Not only on Iraq but on virtually every issue, the first instinct of the media in general (on both the right and the left) is to highlight her so-called "inauthentic" and/or "insincere" and/or "arrogant" motivations and never, to actually think she might believe what she is saying. Is she REALLY more ambitious or arrogant than any other presidential candidate??

A lot of this - at least coming from the right - is the expected sexist response to an ambitious woman. But a lot of it is a fairly natural response to a politician who is precisely as calculating, inauthentic and triangulating as Bill Clinton was (and is), but lacks the charisma and rhetorical gifts to make people ignore their inauthenticity. Bill could always put on the puppy dog eyes and make like he was real, real sorry every time he'd stabbed liberals in the back; Hillary just sounds like she's tallying electoral votes in her head.

I'm sick to death of both of the Clintons, and have been hoping in vain for the party to dump their self-sabotaging "we have to burn down liberalism in order to save it" bullshit. It never worked all that well for any candidate whose name wasn't "Clinton" and it sure didn't work for the liberal coalition. Let Senator Clinton get a permanent chairmanship on some committee and let the ex-president do charity work and roll him out every four years for a convention speech. But they had their shot at running the party and it was not a good time.

Posted by: Christmas on February 22, 2007 01:27 PM

It would also be ridiculous for any Dem to apologize for the Iraq war when Bush/Cheney themselves have offered no apologies.

This is absurd. While Bush and Cheney have been the architects of this monstrosity, they didn't get there on their own, and we shouldn't ignore the Democrats who enabled them. Part of the rationale of the pro-war Dems in 2002 was the addled notion that it would be politically advantageous to roll over on the AUMF, because with the vote out of the way Democrats could talk about the economy and win the midterms. These people sold us out, and most of them are still around. More to the point, the consultant class and the expert class that advised them to sell us out are still around - and we need to keep an eye on where those fuckers end up as the primary moves forward.

Posted by: Christmas on February 22, 2007 01:37 PM

I think someone needs to explain the difference between believing that a President can authorize air strikes on his own and believing that he can authorize a 150,000 troops to invade and occupy a country for 4-6 years. Clearly, there are gigantic differences that can only be explained away if they are ignored completely. The Republican congress clearly knew this. Theres a reason why they brought impeachment charges over a blow job and not over subversion of the constitution.

Also, Most Democratcs never believed in an all-powerful executive branch. None alive today anyway. Hell, most didn't even want to let FDR expand the size of the Supreme Court, which congress is expressly given the power to do. They thought it was just too much. What few tendencies our party had in this direction were killed after Watergate when we all (All Democrats, Republicans still defend that treasonous scumbag, just like they do Jefferson Davis) learned how dangerous an overly powerful president can be.

Posted by: soullite on February 22, 2007 01:57 PM

Amazing that for some who is generally so rooted in reality, Matt misses the real problem here. The issue has nothing to do with "executive authority", here meaning the commander-in-chief powers, I presume.

It has everything to do with Hillary Clinton not being able to recognize something that was obvious even to me, back in 2002: Saddam probably did NOT have nukes, chem/bio weapons are simply not that important, and there wasn't--couldn't possibly be!--any Saddam-Al Qaeda link. If I could see that just from reading newspaper reports (although non-US ones), you'd think a fucking US Senator can do better!

And having recognized that the shrub was leading this nation and a bunch of others up the creek, didn't she owe it to us to at least call bullshit on him? Executive authority presumably don't include the right to do whatever the fuck he wants with the military.

So whatever the merits of her shrub-enabling vote, her real failure is one of leadership. She had the standing, national recognition and political platform to be out in front of this whole debacle. She chose not to take the political risk, and now is desparately trying to spin it. Well, no dice. I'd even help her spin if I thought she'd acted out of principle but been just plain wrong. (Not that my help would make any detectable difference :)). But as it is, I believe she made a mistake and it was motivated by political cowardice. That's a double blow against her in my eyes.

Posted by: Amit Joshi on February 22, 2007 02:57 PM

Amit is correct, the authorization vote had very little to do with executive power in general - this was a specific vote, with a specific scenario and a specific incompetent President.

Al, in the case of not granting Bush powers it has nothing to do with partisanship, and everything to do with Bush (specifically) not be qualified or responsible enough to handle the authority.

Posted by: theCoach on February 22, 2007 04:14 PM

"The SNL joke that had her saying "If I knew then what I know now, that I could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it," gets it mostly right, at least in the minds of primary voters."

Exactly. Matt, you're too smart for your own good here. Executive power theory? Way over most people's heads. They just see someone flipping and flopping back and forth and moving to a complete and diametrically opposed part of the country so she can pick up a Senate seat so she can run for president. Remember, the average American has an IQ of 100.

I also agree that Hillary has Bill Clinton's integrity and
Bill Gates' charisma. Charismatic people can get away with more, especially in politics. Realistically, charisma is the sine qua non in politics in general, especially in anti-intellectual countries like America. Most countries can't understand how a dunderhead like Bush even got close to electoral parity.

Posted by: SFG on February 22, 2007 04:42 PM

!--any Saddam-Al Qaeda link

Hillary was still selling this after Bush had stopped trying. I can't figure out if the people who take this executive theory garbage seriously were in a coma from 2003-2004 or so, there is some sort of doublethink mechanism that prevents them from recalling Hillary and Joe standing strong and trying to wait for the inevitable victory that would vindicate them, or what the hell is going on.

Posted by: Ed Marshall on February 22, 2007 05:34 PM

If that's what she thinks, to hell with her.

But really, if she had voted against the Iraq war, offered some token condemnation at the time she would walk to the whitehouse. How could she not regret it?

Posted by: Chad Okere on February 22, 2007 08:14 PM
But there's every reason to think she thinks it was the right thing to do. She's not refusing to "admit" anything; she's just saying what she thinks.

I almost agree with you here. I think she does believe her vote was correct. But she's not really saying that, or rather she's not saying why her vote was correct to begin with.

What we really need to know is whether she thinks the war itself was a bad idea, or whether she simply thinks George Bush bungled the execution of it. This is a fundamental question Hillary has to address if she wants the support of the Democratic party and the nomination in 2008. The answer to that question, would tell us how Hillary Clinton would conduct foreign policy.

Until she's willing to answer it, she deserves all the heckling she gets.

Posted by: Mikef on February 23, 2007 12:15 AM

Do we have Christians who believe in, say, Holy Ghost but not The Father? What does it means to believe in Executive?

I think that Matthew proves that Hilary is not amazingly stupid and arrogant, she is a conventional thinker (rather than amazingly stupid) and no more arrogant than an average President. Still, we can do better in the intellectual sphere, and in finding someone less visibly arrogant.

PS. About being conventional thinker: it is not just "executive power theory", it is the whole concept of what constitutes American interest, with "projecting power", (our interest is in being able to project power, rather than other way around) "sending right messages" (if we say that we will whack someone, we will), ignoring rather than fostering international consensus (did she say a word on Global Warming, or International Court of Justice?) etc. There is consensus out there that extends from Biden to Cheney, and we need someone from the outside that box.

Posted by: piotr on February 23, 2007 11:43 AM

You lost me. If she believes 1) in executive authority and congressional deference and 2) that the executive exceeded its authority by cooking the books in order to obtain congressional support (she lays culpability at his feet), how can one not feel remorse for extending deference in the first instance? If she wants the desk with the placcard "The Buck Stops Here", she better start acting like it and take ownership. This country is desparate for leadership. Her position does not embody that skill.

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