The Virginian-Pilot reprinted this article in today’s paper. Clinton has been taking some heat for her Iraq vote. Now, it seems, she is unwilling to back away from it:
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.
Will such a stand hurt Clinton’s chances? I think so and she has lost at least one person who was willing to give her a chance. It is just one more reason to dislike and distrust her. I have to give her props for not caving in and issuing an apology just for the sake of trying to placate the anti-war folks, but the quote demonstrates, at least to me, the ice in her veins that so many people say she has. It has an air of arrogance about it, reminding me of that old school yard chant: “those who love me may come to pass; all the others can kiss my …,” well, you get the picture.
Technorati Tags: Hillary Clinton
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
What surprises me most about this stand is that we already have a president that is arrogant and stubborn, and what we certainly don’t need is another. This posturing seems unlikely to work on the Democratic base, and more of a signal to those that can’t stand her in the first place. It’s confusing to guess why she’s going there, or in the least, going there now.
I have long believed that she is uncapable of winning the upcoming election, and this is primarily the reason. To get through the primaries, she has to face a hostile, partisan vote (much the same reason that I cannot see Guiliani or McCain winning for the Republicans). Polls are cited heavily in primary season, but polls find a lot of people who will not vote. As bad as they may be for general elections, I think they are entirely untrustworthy in general elections.
To be honest, I think that Edwards will come out of this the candidate for the Democrats; he might be wise to select Obama as a running mate (and this would be better for Obama, giving him the real step-up he would need to make a strong run for the ultimate office). As for the Republicans, I am clueless. Someone is going to have to step up, and I cannot say I much support Romney.
The issue of the primary vote is one that leads me to believe that none of the so-called frontrunners are going to be able to pull it off.
To CR UVa,
What exactly is Edwards qualifications again? The guy co-sponsored the Iraq war resolution and voted for it. That’s a big disqualifer riight there. The last thing we need is someone with poor judgement. And the worse thing is Edwards was on the intelligence committee. Bob Graham, Russ Feingold etc all saw the same intelligence and voted against the resolution.
This time around, I refuse to support anyone who voted for this war. And that includes Biden, Clinton and Dodd.
Oh, another thing — John Edwards like to talk about Two Americas. Do you know he voted for the egregious bankrupty bill? Do you know he almost never talked about poverty issues in his six years in the US Senate? Do you know he never took a pro bono case? ever? Is he really for the little guy as he loves to proclaim? Well, his record shows something else. His rhetoric doesn’t match his record not one bit.
Vilsack and Richardson are my favorites right now because they don’t have the baggage of senate votes.
I admire her for this. I don’t get this rabid obsession with forcing apologies for these votes out of congress. The fact is, if you put yourself back in that place and time, you are hearing that Saddam had weapons, you are hearing Condi talk about mushroom clouds, if you’d been paying attention the last 10 years you know that Saddam will only cooperate if he thinks his opponent has credible leverage over him. So how do you NOT vote in favor of giving the President authority to use that pressure if necessary? IMO that votge worked brilliantly, if you remember Saddam caved & let the inspectors back in, and had those inspectors been given more time we would have been able to put our mind at ease about our security, without all the bloodshed that actually happened.
No, there was absolutely nothing wrong with giving the President of the United States this authority. What went terribily wrong is how that President USED this authority. Congress put a trust in him, and empowered him, to act responsibly in the best interst of the nation, and he proved unfit to handle that responsibility.
Don’t get me wrong — I was one of the 10% (or whatever) who opposed this war from the very start. In fact I suspect I have been more consistently against this war than many of the masses so clamoring for contrition from congresspeople now. But I think if you REALLY wanted to avodi war the calculus for 2003 clearly was: give Bush a credible stick to force Saddam to let in inspectors, then let those inspectors have the time to verify or dismiss the intelligence we had. The inspectors were teh key to making sure we had the security so we didn’t need to go to war, and the power congress gave Bush was the key to getting those inspectors in. Don’t blame Hillary & other congresspeople for holding up their end of the peaceful way out when it was Bush who abused that trust & took us a direction they probably didn’t expect!
Well, I will not be voting in the Democratic primary, but I find this whole dispute puzzling. If Bush lied, why do Democrats expect Senator Clinton to apologize? Senator Clinton may be arogant, but she is not stupid. I suspect she is wondering too.
Perhaps none of you do think Bush lied. Are you against all wars? Are you pacifists?
Whatever Senator Clinton is, she is not a pacifist. When Senator Clinton voted for the invasion, she was quite certain she did the right thing. Listen to her own words. Read her own words. Interested souls have dug them up. Here it is link.
The hardest thing in politics, as in the rest of life, is trying to convince someone else to admit that they’re wrong. People are personally invested in their own world views and the information around which they create their perception of reality. It personally annoys the crap out of me that Dick Cheney STILL seems to believe that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to American security in spite of years spent in Iraq without turning up enough atoms of yellow-cake uranium to spark a match.
Like Mark, I’m not out to crucify any democratic candidates for their votes to authorize the war. But I think it’s RIDICULOUS to deny any accountability as a United States Senator while trying to crucify the President for his own decisions and conduct related to the course of the war. When Hillary Clinton stands before a crowd and says “if I had been President in 2003, we would not have invaded Iraq” (which she actually has said), and ten minutes later tells the same crowd she’s not going to apologize voting to authorize said war because she doesn’t think it was a mistake, she’s reinforcing every cynical, negative stereotype that Americans hold of their politicians, and I find it terribly depressing.
There’s a way for her to open herself up to the anti-war crowd without branding herself a failure, and she can even keep up with the anti-Bush rhetoric, but she needs to seriously tighten her messaging if she hopes to go anywhere with it.
anonymous — you referenced my post, but you missed my point. Using the THREAT of war to force Saddam to let in inspectors made a lot of sense. So giving the President the authority to pose the THREAT of war made a lot of sense. Saddam backing down & letting in thsoe inpsectors in response made a lot of sense too — Saddam was many things, but he was not irrational or crazy. Everything up to that pont made a lot of sense.
What didn’t make a lot of sense was what happened after that: Bush invaded even though Saddam let the inspecotrs in, and the inspectors said he was cooperating.
I think what Hillary is saying is perfectly valid in that context: she too would have used the threate of war to press Saddam to readmit the inpsectors. But having gotten those inpsecotrs in, she would NOT have continued towards war. That vote was NOT a mistake because it was that vote that gave the muscle to force Saddam to let the inspectors back in, and it was those inspectors who would have proven the absence of any need for war, if they had been given the time. Thus that vote could have PREVENTED the war, if a President with the sensibilities of HRC were in the oval office. Why is this so hard to see what she means?
p.s. to my last msg – this is why I hold HRC in esteem more than ever right now, ironically, even as most others seem to sour on her. I honestly have only been lukewarm towards her to this point (and still am hoping that there are better candidates to chose from, say an Al Gore). She is not taking the pandering, easy way out on this, she has a valid position and she is not just going to blow it off for short term political gain, even if it would be more expedient to do so.
Saddam Hussein had been “cooperating” for well over a decade. We were already at war with Iraq. We had imposed an embargo, no-fly zones, and other restrictions that we would never tolerate ourselves without fighting tooth and nail.
When Saddam Hussein still refused to fully cooperate, Bush offered Saddam Hussein the opportunity to leave Iraq. Hussein stayed, and the rest is history. We invaded, and we fully expected our troops to be hit with chemical weapons (see link).
Bush proceeded quite methodically. The whole process took months. Think about how long it took to put our forces on the ground. Think about how long it took to get the UN to agree. Congress had ample time to speak out. There was no rush to war; Congress was onboard.
Don’t see it as arrogance but a reflection of the cold, hard reality that the #1 barrier for a woman to cross in seeking the executive office is the perception that she is weak, equivocating, emotional, etc.
Thank you Mark for your intelligent remarks. I agree with you entirely. And from what I heard on NPR this morning about this matter, dblhelix’s comment probably is true.
This is the real world of “politics” and I think to chastise Senator Clinton for not admitting it was a mistake (definition: an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.) is ludicrous. Are you asking her, as a candidate for President of the US, to say she was careless? Was she given sufficient knowledge about WMD and just made a mistake? I don’t think so….
This is the classic mistake Democrats tend to make: taking a Republican negative (i.e., Bush lying to the American public and sending us to a horrific, unneccessary war) and then Democrats arguing among themselves who should say I’m sorry the loudest !!! Turn the argument around Democrats — write about Bush’s lies!!!
It will honor the dead and wounded.
Bush lied about what? What information did Bush have that Congress did not have? Have you looked at any of the floor speeches made in Congress when they gave Bush the gohead. Even the Democrats knew what we were in for.
Democrats have a majority in Congress. If Bush lied and started and unnecessary war, why don’t they impeach him?
Why not, indeed. He deserves it.
~
For all of the blustering above, it’s very simple. Sen. Clinton (and every other Member or Senator who voted the same way) made a huge mistake in judgment, in voting for the war. Her inability to admit that SHE made a mistake, instead of dissembling about it and trying to offload responsibility to everyone BUT her, is an insurmountable problem for this voter. This country has just suffered six years of a President who can’t face the fact of his own fallibility – I’m sure as hell not interested in another President with the same problem.
Contrary to Mark’s attempt to rehabilitate Clinton, she’s not standing up for anything but her right to give and stick by a weaselly answer. There’s nothing useful, admirable, or Presidential about that at all.