Every once in a while, the conversation gets back to basics. Via Suburban Guerilla, I found myself at the American Prospect, where we find the following observation:
Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that’s impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have prevailed without the Iraq albatross. Whether or not Clinton’s support was sincere — I don’t think it really matters — sometimes getting big policies wrong really is politically damaging. (See also the 2006 midterms.) This is evidently a good thing.
As one commenter pointed out at the American Prospect, both Kerry and Clinton voted for the war because each thought that it was a necessary precondition for a successful presidential campaign. You can add John Edwards to that list. He, at least, has admitted both to the motivation and the error. Their votes were entirely cynical, in that each voted against a war that I, at least, refuse to believe they were stupid enough to believe was a good idea.
I think it’s true that, had Clinton not voted for the war, she would be the nominee right now. She would have won those early primaries. She would have had no need to go massively negative against Obama, who might never even have run. She would have the near solid support of the party right now.
What I think needs to be said here is that a person with good judgment-the type of judgment Clinton claims to have-could have and should have been able to see all this coming. Put aside that the war was massively immoral. It was doomed to failure from the start, because all of the incompetence, and all of the sectarian violence was entirely foreseeable. Indeed, it was practically inevitable.
The vote for the war was in October 2002. It made a certain amount of cynical sense to vote in favor if you were up for election in November, 2002. (Even that argument is weak. It is arguable that the Democrats cave-in on the issue cost them the Senate in 2002, see, e.g., Minnesota, so it never even helped them in the short term). But it was entirely predictable that the best bet for the long term was a vote against the war, which was doomed to become unpopular as we inevitably became bogged down. The fact that Clinton didn’t see that then is the most damning piece of evidence against her argument that she has either the judgment or the relevant experience to be a better president than Obama.
(Edited to insert missing word)
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