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# Liberal Pundits Offer Unprecedented Apology (Berube, TPM Cafe) —

The organization, “Repentant Villagers,” announced today that it would be issuing formal apologies to hundreds of liberal bloggers, including Duncan Black, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Glenn Greenwald, and “Digby,” acknowledging that the progressive blogosphere was right about Lieberman after all. “No one could have anticipated the breach of the party,” said Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the New Republic. “But Lieberman’s recent op-ed, calling the Democratic Party insufficiently pro-American, is just sheer barking lunacy. I could never have seen this coming two years ago when I was calling Lieberman’s critics ‘a pack of crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals,’ and I’m deeply sorry. It looks like I turned out to be the truly ignorant one in the end.”

# Fafblog Interviews: HILLARY CLINTON — Worth it for this part alone — “That’s that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don’t just talk about change. You talk about how much you don’t just talk about change!” — but there’s more….

CLINTON: I didn’t vote for the war, Fafnir. I voted to give the president the authority to go to war. What was he going to use that authority for? Maybe he’d just frame it and hang it in his office. Maybe he’d use it to prop up one of the legs on his desk. Maybe he’d use it to sing songs and dance jigs and lift weary spirits down at the old folks home! I honestly couldn’t say!

FB: If only you knew at the time that that devious George Bush would use a war authorization to authorize a war!

CLINTON: You know, I guess I’m just too giving. Maybe I just love my country too much to deny it the universal health care and endless wars it so desperately needs. Maybe some theoretical secret black Muslim who hates America wouldn’t have that problem.

FB: Maybe it didn’t have to be an actual war, though. Maybe you coulda just met the president halfway by settin a big pile a money on fire an shootin a buncha random people.

# The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference: “Write better emails. Make more moneys.” —

Like most Nigerians, you’re probably finding that it’s increasingly difficult to earn a decent living from email. That’s why you need to attend the 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.

“This conference is an investment in your future. Learn to take advantage of modern technology, and make a great deal of money with very little effort. If you have any question, please contact me and I will send you a proposal that may be of interest to you. I await your response by return while assuring you that the transaction is absolutely risk free.”
- Dr. Collins Mbadiwe

# Shroud Of Turin Accidentally Washed With Red Shirt (The Onion) —

The damage occurred when Pope Benedict XVI, whose turn it was to do the Vatican laundry, did not notice that a brand-new, bright-red Hanes Beefy-T belonging to Cardinal Angelo Sodano had been placed inside of the consecrated cleansing vessel, the Holy Whirlpool 24934 top-load washer.

Sound advice for Obama supporters — in a barely friendly, clenched-teeth, … oh, what the heck, fairly hostile sort of way — from Obama-skeptic Kate Harding (at “Shakesville”). With the refrain “Obama is not a f*@%ing progressive,” Harding rehearses a well-researched list of many of the Obama negatives I’ve noted myself,* concluding

Obama has feet of clay, just like every other politician in history. Quit trying to pretend he doesn’t and start figuring out how to help reinforce them. Be realistic about who this candidate is, to whom he’s beholden, and how much he can reasonably accomplish, so you don’t end up under your bed sucking your thumb when the shit starts to fly.

For my part, this Kool-Aid Kultist welcomes — nay, applauds — Obama-skepticism (really) and even ninety-thousand word obscenity-laced posts devoted to it (not really). I merely hope for a correspondingly skeptical post about Senator Clinton by the Shakesville team in the near future. Someone I know called Obama the “new Teflon candidate” today — nothing sticks. But I wonder — is there an example of some industrial substance that got approved simply because everyone thought someone else would ban it?

Ms. Harding says her goal is simply to explore “Obama the myth vs. Obama the man” — but cannot forebear to note she voted for Clinton mainly (and merely) because Clinton knows how to fight the slime machine propaganda the GOP will throw at either candidate, and Obama allegedly doesn’t. In the key rhetorical move of the post, she wisely concedes Clinton is no “f*@%ing” progressive either — and wisely places that concession very, very early in her long, long march through Obama’s shortcomings.

But if that’s the case, progressivism isn’t this critic’s sine qua non, either, nor is skepticism per se. Instead we essentially have one intrapartisan’s demand that opposing intrapartisans step back, take a good look at their candidate, and find him wanting in characteristics … that she apparently doesn’t require of her preferred candidate either.

I looked at Ms. Harding’s post via Jeff Fecke (”Blog of The Moderate Left”), an Obama supporter and sometime Shakesville contributor who endorses Ms. Harding’s post more generously. His post actually was a genuine call for skepticism about either candidate, and for pushing them the right way towards the right goals:

By all means, recognize that both candidates have failings, and push them to correct them, especially if they are the candidate you support. But make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons, and with the right goals in mind. If we push Obama or Clinton to the left, they will move to the left. But if we push them to the right — if we attack them as elitist, soft, emotional, out-of-touch — if we do that, they will move to the right. And that is not the direction we want them to go.

But push them. Push them. Push them.

Amen to that.

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* E.g., here, here, here, and here. My principal Clinton-skepticism post is here.
EDITS, 4/13: “mainly/merely” and “allegedly” clauses and additional “e.g.” links added.

Senator Feingold addresses fundraiser attendees
Two other photos from the event here.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew
(For more and better images, see KC’s photos.)

I went to a “Netroots Nation” fundraiser yesterday at the Mott House near the Capitol. The price was pretty reasonable as fundraisers go, and there was the prospect of seeing some friends and hearing from some of the good guys in Washington, D.C., including Senator Russ Feingold. The entry price went to support expenses for the Yearly Kos meeting in Austin this summer; that seemed like a pretty good cause.

Several online friends of mine were there, including KCinDC, altHippo, and WorldWideWeber. (Not sure anonymity is important to all of them, but I’ll go with the pseudonyms just in case.)

The first order of business was hearing from Feingold and others. Feingold — an Obama voter and likely supporter as superdelegate — surprised me a little by saying that “January 21, 2009 is as important as January 20″, meaning that it wouldn’t just matter who’s elected, but how the next president actually proceeds. He continued that it was important that the online progressive community held Washington’s feet to the fire. The subtext really seemed to be that even if Obama was elected, Feingold felt the “netroots” audience would need to continue putting pressure on DC to do the right thing. In a followup, a questioner mentioned Jim Webb and his disappointing votes on FISA. Feingold didn’t spit fire and brimstone, of course, but he said he felt the questioner needed to keep the pressure on — “not saying get rid of him”, but keep the pressure on.

Other speakers included Representatives Lloyd Doggett (TX-25), Steve Cohen (TN-9), Brad Miller (NC-13), and Rush Holt (NJ-12). Several had a bit of trouble drowning out a single songbird that was just singing his heart out as dusk gathered. But all of them made a very good impression on me. Cohen mentioned he was going to speak up for Barack Obama at a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League — which drew strong applause; I’m not saying Clinton supporters would have booed that, but my impression was that if polled, the crowd would probably have favored Obama by a wide margin. Miller noted that all incoming House members try to pick an obscure topic to become expert in that won’t step on anyone else’s toes - his was mortgage lending, and he was emphatic that in his view lenders had gone into the subprime loan business with a view to “stripping equity” from their customers.

Weber and I wound up having a long talk with altHippo. AH wondered what I thought of what he’s calling the “great 2008 rift” in the lefty blogosphere, as Obama and Clinton partisans duke it out online, and suggested it was (again paraphrasing) the end of an era of community of lefty bloggers who had made objectivity their goal rather than propaganda. I allowed that was a concern, but offered a couple of countertheories; one, that like Feingold was suggesting, some bloggers are putting down markers for being ready to go into opposition if (or when) Obama or Clinton disappoint — should one of them be elected, knock on wood.

A second thought was that as the Bush years have worn on, enraging so many of us, and as the established opinion media have at best failed to oppose him, the leftish blogosphere has put a premium on rhetorical feistiness. Some of that no-holds barred anger has maybe carried over to a Democratic campaign where neither remaining candidate looks like a progressive savior, so as people wind up choosing sides, there’s little reason to hold back with all the firepower gained from doing our “rhetorical pushups”, as I called it, over the years.

I had and have few ready quotes or links to point to in support of any of the above. On a third point, however, I do; an observation by Obsidian Wings reader “callimaco” about the Ohio primary rang true. I’ll leave it an excerpt, but the whole thing was very good:

More, [working class voters] don’t want to “join” anything. They want a “transaction”. That’s the “vote for me” model of political action. The transaction is this: we will vote for you and you will fight for us. Clinton offered them that transaction and they voted for her.

Maybe there’s a way to square that with my feeling that sometimes, perhaps given all the imponderables, the fight between online Obama and Clinton supporters often seems to turn on more on their evaluation of eachother than of the candidates. Many of us have faced or face a difficult choice between candidates, one involving weighing their Iraq, healthcare and other policy positions, the kind of campaign they run, the kind of support they’ve built, and the kind of advocate and president they might be. Once we’ve made our choices, the conflicts with others may “simply” reflect personality types and personal priorities.

There’s nothing wrong with that — I just hope we’ll all see there was nothing all that wrong with picking the other candidate either. Or that our preferred one may not be all he or she is cracked up to be. Come November, it’s going to need to be good enough that McCain and the Bush tradition he intends to carry forward is much worse. But like Feingold said, come January 21, 2009, our job won’t be over even if McCain loses.

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* I’m paraphrasing Feingold’s remarks from memory; while the gist is accurate, they may not be the precise remark Feingold made.

EDIT, 4/10: next to last paragraph edited a couple of times, to little avail.
UPDATE, 4/11: altHippo discusses the event and our discussion as well, and provides an example of an arguably unproductive Obama critique at Talkleft. Matthew Yglesias was there, too (fundraiser, not our discussion), and was glad of the reminder that there are some bona fide good guys in Congress.
UPDATE, 4/14:: Welcome Air America readers — and thanks for the link(s), Avedon.

In an interview with CNN earlier this week Senator Clinton, responding to a question about her foreign policy experience, listed efforts in Northern Ireland, Macedonia and Bosnia, among others. But Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, of the Chicago Tribune report (”Clinton’s experience claim under scrutiny“):

But her involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process was primarily to encourage activism among women’s groups there, a contribution that the lead U.S. negotiator described as “helpful” but that an Irish historian who has written extensively about the conflict dismissed as “ancillary” to the peace process.

The Macedonian government opened its border to refugees the day before Clinton arrived to meet with government leaders. And her mission to Bosnia was a one-day visit in which she was accompanied by performers Sheryl Crow and Sinbad, as well as her daughter, Chelsea, according to the commanding general who hosted her.

Forwarded by my Department of Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.

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UPDATE, 3/11: Sinbad weighs in.

There are so many ways I really, really hate this:

Look, I have said that Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience, and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002. I think that is a significant difference. I think that since we now know Senator McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. And I believe that I have done that, certainly Senator McCain has done that, and you’ll have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.”

Nicely done! You’ve just ranked the prospective Democratic presidential nominee below the GOP nominee. And when you get done high-fiving about this with Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson, you’ll notice you even ranked yourself below McCain. Are you having some V.P. negotiations with McCain we need to know about?

Look, Bill Clinton was still picking the Arkansas hayseeds out of his hair when we elected him over a former CIA director, UN ambassador, Vice President, and incumbent President. And we were right to. And we’ll be right to when we pick Obama over McCain in November — after all, McCain made the same stupid call on Iraq that you did.

While I supported him in the Maryland primary, I’ve been critical of the Obama campaign as recently as Tuesday. But every time I take a step back and think about the big picture, I realize I’m making big things out of comparatively small ones — small, that is, compared to going to war in Iraq on false premises, playing on people’s fears with 3AM phone calls …and now this. Obama’s assorted missteps and off-key notes on issues like NAFTA or health care simply don’t measure up to that — and McCain can’t plausibly use them the way he can use your stupid statement.

I could go on — making this about being “commander in chief”, rather than plain old “president”; conceding to McCain some kind of major foreign policy or military wisdom; playing into the “Democrats not tough enough” notion.

But you probably don’t care about all that. So maybe you’ll care about this: if it wasn’t already dead, this should also end the notion of a Obama/Clinton or Clinton/Obama ticket – “so, Senator Clinton, you’re saying Obama’s commander in chief material now?” or “so, Senator Clinton, you’re saying Obama’s good enough to be a heartbeat away now?” Is burning your bridges with allies going to be your 3AM choice in the future, too? It seems to me that’s what you’ve done.

Obama would be smart — and right — to say that he takes you at your word, so he’s herewith formally ruling out a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket; no two-for-one deal — time to choose. You might be surprised how many of your more wobbly supporters will be disheartened by that. A lot more than Obama’s, would be my guess.

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UPDATE, 3/12: House Speaker Pelosi wades in to the fight (TPM/Veracifier video) when asked about a “dream ticket.” The pursed-lipped Pelosi: “I think [Clinton] has fairly ruled that out by proclaiming McCain would make a better commander in chief than Obama. I think that ticket — either way — is impossible.” She then doubled back to the reporter to say “[I didn't want to] leave you with any ambiguity.”

DEPARTMENT OF CONGRESSIONAL KREMLINOLOGY: Interestingly, Pelosi said “the Clinton administration” where I bracketed “[Clinton]” in the quote. Though there have been recent indications of a switch in tactics (FISA, contempt citations), the House Democratic 110th congressional leadership has been a limp opponent to Bush, essentially gambling everything on winning the White House in November. It looks to me like the label for that gamble has been burned into Pelosi’s mind.

If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.

— Bill Clinton, October 25, 2004

(Quote via Ben Smith, Politico) The Clinton ad and the Obama response can be viewed by playing the video above.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I wound up voting for Obama in the Maryland primary because I thought “getting bamboozled into approving a disastrous war seems like a mistake [Hillary Clinton] could all too easily make again.”

At the time, I didn’t support that statement with a discussion of Senator Clinton’s vote for the Iraq Authorization of Military Force (AUMF). This post considers the evidence and alternatives available to Clinton* at the time, as well as subsequent statements about the AUMF and similar issues by herself and supporters.

• Standards of evidence
• Undue lack of diligence
• Misled by experience
• The Levin Amendment: wrong then, still wrong now
• Unreliable memory
• Looking ahead
• Conclusions
• Resources

Standards of evidence
A fundamental problem for 2002 AUMF supporters such as Senator Clinton (and Senator Edwards, and myself, for that matter) is that it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And that was the premise on which Senator Clinton and so many others built their support, however reluctant or nuanced, for waging war — or authorizing it at President Bush’s discretion, if you prefer. As Clinton herself began her October 10, 2002 Senate speech announcing her support for the AUMF (emphases added here an in other quotes):

Today we are asked whether to give the President of the United States authority to use force in Iraq should diplomatic efforts fail to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons and his nuclear program.

Like most — but not all — of the Senate, Hillary Clinton accepted as a given something that would prove to be completely mistaken. She has insisted that she did not simply accept the Bush administration’s word for that, but did her own “due diligence” as well. That’s good, of course; how she appears to have done so is less good, judging by her statement to the Concord Monitor last December:

I talked to a lot of people in my husband’s administration, I talked to Tony Blair, I talked to a lot of sources, and I had the same question: Do you think he still has these kinds of capacities?

Apparently, many to most of her sources answered “yes,” “even though” they were Tony Blair or Clinton administration hands. “Due diligence” appears to have been simply substituting one authority with an equally mistaken second one — rather than personally consulting the available evidence and asking herself, “Do I think it’s proven that he has these capacities?”

Undue lack of diligence
Other Senators did just that by taking a close look at the complete National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) — all too few, to be sure (22 told the The Hill they did, while a staffer told the same reporters “less than ten”; a Washington Post article reports 6 signatures on a log).

The Hill report tally suggests there was a definite relationship between reading the NIE and “Nay” votes on the AUMF. Of the 22 Senators claiming to have read the NIE, 43% voted against the resolution, compared with only 23% of Senators overall. The discrepancy is larger yet for Democratic Senators — 10 of 14, or 71%, voted against the resolution. (A spreadsheet with detailed AUMF vote and NIE response data and tabulations can be viewed here.)

The full NIE made clearer the lack of intelligence agency consensus on Iraq WMDs — an instructive contrast with the browbeating certainties Cheney and Bush were trumpeting over the airwaves. Of course, skepticism about Bush’s Iraq WMD claims may have preceded reading the report for many Senators. But however their Iraq war “Nay” votes and NIE perusals were related, Senator Clinton was not among their number; she told a protester in New Hampshire that she was merely “briefed” on the NIE, according to Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr. (”Hillary’s War,” New York Times Magazine, 5/29/07).

Gerth and Van Natta found one other crucial pre-war “intelligence consumption” error — or worse — by Senator Clinton. She accused Saddam of harboring Al Qaeda terrorists, even though that was not supported by the NIE she was briefed on, and was all but contradicted by other 2002 intelligence reports. Gerth and Van Natta note that Ken “Threatening Storm” Pollack felt the link was “[expletive]“ — and discussed Iraq with Clinton before her 2002, though he didn’t share his advice with the two reporters.

Misled by experience

Senator Clinton believed she was drawing on President Bill Clinton’s experiences in authorizing the use of military force in Iraq. This was evident in a brief meeting Senator Clinton had with a large “Code Pink” activist delegation, reported by Gerth and Van Natta. As it happens, a video of the meeting (shot by Kirsten Michels) is available, and is provided to the right; I’ve made a transcript of the remarks by Senator Clinton and activist participants including Medea Benjamin. The meeting ended acrimoniously — an activist tried to give Senator Clinton a pink slip, who got angry about that — but before that it was a remarkably good window into the Senator’s thinking.

Senator Clinton claimed to have “ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information and intelligence that I had available.” When a participant challenged the case for the war, adding “it is not up to this government to disarm Saddam Hussein, it’s up to the community of nations,” Senator Clinton responded:

…With respect to whose responsibility it is to disarm Saddam Hussein, I just do not believe that, given the attitudes of many people in the world community today, that there would be a willingness to take on very difficult problems, were it not for the United States’ leadership. And I’m talking specifically about what had to be done in Bosnia and Kosovo, where my husband could not get a Security Council resolution to save the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing. And we did it alone as the United States, and we had to do it alone. It would have been far preferable if the Russians and others had agreed to do it through the United Nations. They would not. I’m happy that in the face of such horrible suffering we did act.

And so I see it somewhat differently - you’ll forgive me - from my experience and perspective.

It seems to me from this that Hillary Clinton’s experience, such as it was, actually worked against her; she made a false analogy between an actual human rights crisis* on the heels of prior ones and a theoretical WMD “crisis” that wasn’t, illogically seeing the obstacles to US action in both cases as proof-by-similarity of the correctness of the war policy — and of the short-circuited diplomatic policy that went with it.

The Levin Amendment: wrong then, still wrong now
The most interesting part of Gerth and Van Natta’s report is their examination of Clinton’s vote on the Levin Amendment to the AUMF — mischaracterized by Senator Clinton in the January 31 Los Angeles debate as suggesting that “the United States would subordinate whatever our judgment might be going forward to the United Nations Security Council.”

While this was indeed an oft-repeated criticism — by the likes of Joe Lieberman or John McCain — during the October 9/10, 2002 debates about the Levin Amendment, it was simply untrue, as patient but unavailing rebuttals by Senators Levin, Sarbanes, and others made clear.

While the Levin Amendment made immediate congressional authorization of military force contingent on an appropriate U.N. Security Council resolution, it reserved the right of self-defense and also said that Congress would not adjourn indefinitely (“sine die“) but would “return to session at any time before the next Congress convenes to consider promptly proposals relative to Iraq if in the judgment of the President the United Nations Security Council fails to adopt or enforce” a resolution authorizing military force to enforce unrestricted inspections.***

That is, war was not authorized by the Congress unless it was by the United Nations — but if the U.N. didn’t authorize military enforcement of full inspection access, Congress stood ready to reconsider immediately. While the resolution shared the preconception that there were Iraqi WMD to discover and destroy, it was a last ditch effort to insert world community approval between peace and a unilateral decision by Bush to go to war. If that approval was not forthcoming, war proponents would have had to address that — along with the continued failure to find (nonexistent) WMD; if it was, the world would at least have shared in the responsibility for Iraq.

After considerable debate on October 9 and 10, the Levin Amendment failed 24-75 in the full Senate. While Senator Clinton subsequently argued, both in her floor speech on October 10th and in statements since then, that she was voting for diplomacy and against pre-emptive war, she had voted against the primary legislative effort that would have forced Bush to seek world community approval.

Unreliable memory
While Clinton touts her foreign policy experience, experience is no help if you don’t correctly remember (or communicate) what has happened. And Senator Clinton’s L.A. debate statement about the Levin amendment isn’t the only example of her getting uncomfortable facts about Iraq wrong. In her pre-New Hampshire primary interview with the Concord Monitor, Senator Clinton spoke of President Bill Clinton’s “Operation Desert Fox” as a precedent for Bush’s war, and a justification for her (qualified) authorization:

In ‘98, [Saddam] threw the inspectors out, which at least to me raised the possibility that they were getting close to something, and therefore he wanted them out.

Well, no. What actually happened was that while Saddam arguably made it too difficult for inspectors to do worthwhile work, he didn’t “throw them out” — they eventually left at the behest of the U.S. ambassador to the UN, and a looming military campaign by the U.S. and U.K. to destroy suspect sites.

Looking ahead
Well and good: Hillary Clinton isn’t perfect, she made some mistakes that others — including John Edwards — have made as well. The critical thing now is that she’s learned from them.

Except that’s not clear, either. As Jonathan Schwarz (”A Tiny Revolution”) noted, she was willing to go out on a limb about what Israel had accomplished with its bombing of a Syrian installation in a debate last September:

…what we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out.

But as Seymour Hersh has written — and as Obama pointed out in a rejoinder — that’s not clear at all. Hersh said he was repeatedly told by sources that they were “not aware of any solid evidenceof ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria.” Instead, the bombing may have just been a reaction to the Hezbollah war fiasco in the summer of 2006: “The truth is not important,” [an ambassador to Israel of an Israeli ally] told me. “Israel was able to restore its credibility as a deterrent. That is the whole thing. No one will know what the real story is.” So it may have been an attack on a questionable target to send a message and assuage a keenly felt defeat. Sounds familiar.

Likewise, there’s the matter of Iran. In Los Angeles, Clinton came out against “putting the prestige of the presidency” on the line with meetings with leaders of countries like (it may be assumed) Iran. Obama, by contrast, warned against “mission creep” in Iraq starting to include a goal of Iran. He also cited the — ahem — recent NIE on Iran, noting it “suggested that if we are meeting with them, talking to them, and offering them both carrots and sticks, they are more likely to change their behavior, and we can do so in a way that does not ultimately cost billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and hurt our reputation around the world.”****

Conclusions
As some reading this blog know, I made arguments similar to Senator Clinton’s in 2003. But at least I now recognize at least some of the problems with these arguments — and their less rational underpinnings. Given that there were no WMD to disarm Saddam of, the evidence for them could not possibly have been definitive.

Hillary Clinton was certainly not alone in being certain that there were WMD in Iraq. Still, she did have more information at her disposal than most — and she failed to take advantage of that. In an early excellent analysis of pre-war intelligence and decision-making, “Operation Desert Snipe,” blogger RonK calls the whole fiasco “a marvelous case study in… collective self-deception. The plot spoilers were there all the time. “Everybody” was so sure, and so wrong.” Clinton supporters argue that she has long recognized her vote was a mistake, pointing to statements from late 2005 through the Los Angeles debate at the end of last month that “If Congress had been asked [to authorize the war], based on what we know now, we never would have agreed.” But that’s not really the same thing as saying “based on what we didn’t know then, we never should have agreed.” And while she arguably went a little further in the February 26 Cleveland debate, using it as the vote she would most like to have taken back and that she “would not have voted that way again,” it’s still not clear whether she understands or admits just what her mistake was in doing so.

There’s a revealing postscript to the Code Pink/Hillary meeting story, I think, in Gerth and Van Natta’s article. By 2006, Hillary Clinton was disenchanted with the Iraq war and began joining meetings of other Senators who were as well. But when Senator Feingold said “Democrats want us out” of Iraq, Clinton replied,“I face the base all the time…I think we need wiggle room.”

Hillary had not reached out beyond her comfort zone for advice, she had not taken the trouble to see for herself whether there was truly an imminent threat from Iraq, and she had voted against the measure that would have required a United Nations decision before proceeding to military action. Meanwhile, for all their kumbayah songs and pink outfits, Code Pink activists had been right, and she had been wrong. But even as she began to climb down from her 2002 mistake, they and other war opponents were still merely a “base” to be “faced” — and delayed.

Now the base is biting back. I’m not a whole-hearted Obama supporter, but on this — the defining issue of the last six years — his independent analysis was right, and her follow-the-leaders analysis was wrong. Under the actual rules of our political game these days, getting issues of war and peace right the first time has become the President’s job. By that measure Clinton is, shall we say, no slam dunk.

RESOURCES, FURTHER READING
[Many of the items below can be found via a Hillary Clinton + Iraq shared link set.]

• Hillary’s War, Jeff Gerth, Don Van Natta, Jr., New York Times Magazine, 5/29/07
• AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002 (House, 10/10, Senate: 10/11, signed: 10/16/02); Wikipedia entry.
• Floor Speech of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq, 10/10/02
• Few senators read Iraq NIE report, The Hill, 6/19/07
• Spreadsheet tables by me: Senators’ AUMF votes by…
  …(1) party, (2) whether read NIE, (3) Levin Amendment, and more, as well as detailed roll calls for the AUMF and the Levin Amendment.
• Video of Clinton meeting with Code Pink delegation, 3/6/03 (by Kirsten Michel); transcript (by me)
• The Senate’s Forgotten Iraq Choice (Lincoln Chafee, R-RI, op-ed), 3/1/07
• Debate on Levin Amendment, roll call, 10/9, 10/10/02. (The links lead to the superb “Liberated Text” site, which organizes this and other congressional debates into readable, easy-to-follow web pages.)
• Clinton Devised Both Pro-war and Anti-war Candidacy (Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent), 2/5/08
• Democratic presidential candidate debates: Dartmouth, Los Angeles, Cleveland (9/26/07, 1/31/08, 2/26/08)
• Remembering Clinton And Obama On Syria Bombing (Jonathan Schwarz, “A Tiny Revolution”), 2/4/08
• Operation Desert Snipe (RonK, “Cogent Provocateur”), 4/23/03
• Arguments by Clinton supporter “eriposte” at TalkLeft
  

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* It should be said that this evidence and these alternatives were also available to my favored candidate John Edwards. Also, as I mentioned last week, I shared the view at the time that Saddam’s alleged WMD development justified the war.
** (1) I realize some argue the Kosovo crisis was trumped up, but I respectfully disagree; after Bosnia and after Srebrenice, it was impossibile to exaggerate or ignore Milosevic’s willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing when the harbingers of more appeared in Kosovo. This may or may not have been our fight, but it was not a fight about a mirage. (2) Senator McCain also made the comparison to Kosovo during the Iraq AUMF debates.
*** E.g., Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) :“I will not and cannot support any effort to give the United Nations Security Council Congress’s proxy in deciding whether or not to send American men and women into combat in Iraq. No Security Council vote can answer my questions about plans for securing WMD or American responsibilities in the wake of an invasion of Iraq. It is for this reason that I must oppose the proposal of the distinguished Senator from Michigan.” However, contra “eriposte” (”TalkLeft”) and other Clinton supporters, this should not be seen as agreement with Senator Clinton’s L.A. debate remarks. On the face of his remarks, Feingold was concerned about any automatic authorization of force, even one contingent on a UNSC resolution. Clinton — as her subsequent AUMF vote showed — was not.
**** From “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities”: “Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.”

EDIT, 3/2: “arguments” link added.
EDIT, 4/15: spreadsheet listed as separate resource.

Feb 12 primary vote, Takoma Park Elementary School.
How’d I vote? Who knows, really; those are Diebold
voting machines in the background.
Originally uploaded by Thomas Nephew.

When I last held forth on my likely Maryland primary vote, I wrote that I’d be supporting John Edwards because both I had problems with both Clinton and Obama. But by the time I cast my vote — and not much before than that — I couldn’t do that any longer.

As Atrios wrote the other day, these elections aren’t about me, my endorsements, or my vote by a long shot. But I can speak to my own conclusions about how and why to vote more authoritatively than I can about other people’s.

I tried to see both sides of the health care “mandates” controversy that is one of the principal domestic policy issues dividing Obama from Clinton (and also from Paul Krugman). I’ll try to put together what I’ve read about this into another post. I wound up agreeing more with Krugman and Clinton… but also suspecting that given another week and a health care policy tutor, I might see things differently. When (or if) it proves necessary, Obama may just fix what Hillary proposes to avoid in the first place, at the cost of some “I told you so”s from his critics.

My main reason came down to Iraq, and Iran, and wars I can’t foresee. What seemed like a tie between Clinton outscoring Obama on domestic issues and getting outscored on foreign policy wasn’t one when I thought about it some more, and read comments like this one on a post comparing the two candidates:

It frankly amazes me how many Democrats who are so strongly anti-Iraq war are still on the fence between Hillary and Obama and refuse to hold Hillary accountable for her vote on the Iraq war AND her refusal to concede that her vote was a BIG mistake.

Yes it was. I spent a fair amount of time before Tuesday tracking down Hillary’s own views at the time about why she voted to authorize Bush to do as he pleased regarding Iraq, rather than even forcing him to wait for a second congressional authorization, as the ill-fated Levin Amendment would have required. I may have more on that another time as well; suffice it to say I concluded that Hillary’s experience and connections actually worked against her on that occasion. Given that she still defends the decision, and still has most of the same connections, getting bamboozled into approving a disastrous war seems like a mistake she could all too easily make again.

It’s not out of bounds for Clinton supporters to point out that Obama’s and Hillary’s Iraq votes have been very similar since he joined the Senate. However, a similar Senate voting record doesn’t support the inference that he would necessarily have voted similarly for the authorization to use military force — only that his decisions were similar once he was facing a quagmire she had helped authorize and he had not.

I remain skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric and approach. At a moment when a progressive/liberal consensus seems to be within reach, Obama can seem to dial down what might be accomplished and won with a campaign based more on his personality than on a platform (though his recent Wisconsin speech offered welcome specifics). I worry that he seems to sometimes accept conservatoids and their talking points on their own terms, rather than simply defeating them at the polls.

Both Obama and Clinton seem to promise a less authoritarian/dictatorial presidency; both answered questions on executive powers pretty well, though Charlie Savage didn’t really ask how they might undo Bush’s mistakes and crimes, rather than simply not repeat them. Obama’s opposition to Bush’s or Cheney’s impeachment is disappointing, to be sure (“should be reserved for grave… intentional breaches of the president’s authority”?!). But there’s no firm ground to prefer Hillary on that score.

In “Neither of the Above,” I wrote “It appears to me by now that I’m being presented with a choice almost designed to cost me the maximum amount possible for my support.” But there’s also my own past support for authorizing the Iraq war to consider, however regretful or grudging that support was. Maybe it ought to cost me something to prefer a war opponent over a war authorizer — including battles refused or postponed, rather than fully joined, over universal health care that works, or over the toxic brew of regressive religion, bought-and-paid-for media, and me-first conservatism that also put that bulls-eye on Hillary’s back.

Clinton and I both pushed a liberal agenda further into the future when we supported that war. She should pay a price for both her decision to authorize the Iraq war, and for all the consequences of that decision; on reflection, I felt honor-bound to agree with her paying that price. The presidency is less about developing specific policy proposals, leading culture or ideology wars, or even one’s unfortunate pronouncements on impeachment, than it is about making the right decision when it counts. So while (or maybe, if) there’s a price to be paid, I feel Obama is a better enough decisionmaker when it counts that I needed to pay that price.

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EDIT, 3/18: Wisconsin speech link added.

Obama: Actually, I Think We Can (hilzoy, “Obsidian Wings”) — A richly linked counterpoint to my own irritable “Yes, we can what?” question below: a focus on existential threats like avian flu and nonproliferation, more transparency in the White House, criminalizing deceptive election practices and voter intimidation, a seemingly innocuous government tech plan that might pay big dividends. Squint the right way, and this seems big; squint the wrong way, and it’s small ball compared to universal health care now.

hilzoy also partly addresses the “bad bipartisanship issue” — she provides examples of successful legislation, including the truly impressive videotaping law he got passed in Illinois. I say partly because that still leaves things like the Lieberman endorsement and similar political missteps (in my view), and the “too willing to echo right-wing memes” charge. But while I’m still leery of the adulation for Obama, there may be more of a basis to it than I’ve conceded.

Making the Case… for Hillary Clinton (Sean Wilentz, November 2007 interview in Newsweek) — Wilentz argues that it takes someone who’s lived through the political crossfires of the past forty years to make it in the White House, and that Obama, by contrast, is a kind of “Adlai Stevenson” candidate — too proudly and consciously above the fray to get much done, or perhaps even get elected. “It’s the end of age of Reagan, and you need a leader who can take us out of it.” Re worries about Hillary’s polarizing the electorate and energizing the Republicans,* he says that’s a Republican head-fake: “Whenever Republicans tell us who they want us to nominate, we should nominate her. They’re scared of her.”

The “Theory of Change” Primary Mark Schmitt (The American Prospect) — Schmitt sees the election a little differently:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. [...]

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won’t be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows.

Election 2008: Who I am Supporting in the Democratic Primary (eRiposte, “TalkLeft”) — Written back when Edwards was still in the race, this is the most thoroughly researched and argued pro-Hillary blog post I’ve come across, even backing up a seemingly arguable assertion — “I believe she is clearly the most electable of the three top candidates” — with evidence of campaign missteps that may come back to haunt Obama. Regarding Iraq, eRiposte writes There is little “fundamental difference” between them on how they acted in Congress and how they would address Iraq and Iran going forward,” and asserts that there is “reasonable doubt as to whether Sen. Obama would have voted against the 2002 Iraq resolution if he had been in the U.S. Senate at the time. Everything he has done in the U.S. Senate on Iraq has been almost 100% in lock-step with Sen. Clinton.”

See also: NYCweboy (Clinton), Spencer Ackerman (Obama), lambert (Clinton), Chris Hayes (Obama).

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* That’s not a hilzoy argument, to be clear.

NOTE: final links via posts by Ezra Klein, who links to more, and finds “An Elite Consensus for Obama.” Klein himself is not endorsing anyone publicly.

Democratic Debate in Los Angeles — I don’t get cable, so this will have to do. By all accounts it was a civil debate, and judging by the transcript it was actually a fairly substantive one as well. However, Juan Cole (”Informed Comment”) caught Hillary in a mistake about “Operation Desert Fox” — Saddam had not kicked out the inspectors to cause the three-day bombing campaign in 1998. (Rather, as I recall, he had failed to grant them full access to sites they were to inspect.) I agree with Cole that Obama got the better of this part of the debate.

Clinton, Obama, Insurance (Paul Krugman, New York Times) — Krugman continues to be skeptical of Obama:

…new estimates say that a plan resembling Mrs. Clinton’s would cover almost twice as many of those now uninsured as a plan resembling Mr. Obama’s — at only slightly higher cost. [...]

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

The Boom was a Bust for Ordinary People (Barbara Ehrenreich in the Washington Post) —

It begins to sound a bit naughty — all this talk about the need to “stimulate” the economy, as if we were discussing how to make a porn film. I don’t mean to trivialize our economic difficulties or the need for effective government intervention, but we have to face a disconcerting fact: For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans.

The Lessons of ‘94 (Ezra Klein, The American Prospect) — Klein contends that what went wrong with the Clinton healthcare plan was that they took too long to create it (a recession was all but over by the time it was unveiled) and perhaps more importantly tried to create an exquisitely crafted, take it or leave it package, which a Congress full of egos as jumbo-sized as Bill’s was quite happy to leave. The questions are, I suppose, is that really what happened, and does Hillary agree that’s really what happened?

The Problem with Bill 2.0 (Josh Marshall, “Talking Points Memo”) — “…it’s precisely because I’m looking forward to supporting her if she is the nominee that I hate seeing her being overshadowed by her spouse and having her husband bigfoot the process which diminishes her and makes me think her presidency could be a 4 year soap opera where Bill won’t shut up and let her have a shot at doing the job.”

The Commander in Chief at the Lowest Ebb (David Barron, Marty Lederman, Harvard Law Review, .PDF, about 1000 pages, OK, 116 pages) — This is liable to be important both in the near term, as Bush asserts yet more powers to do whatever he likes, and in the longer term, as a new administration hopefully charts a new, more lawful and less dictatorial path for the executive branch. Lederman is a former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who contributes to the blog “Balkinization” — and who I suspect might not mind joining a new Democratic administration.

I haven’t read it all, but I’ve started it and that should count for something. The title is taken from Justice Jackson’s 1952 Youngstown Sheet and Tube ruling, in which he held that executive branch discretion was at its lowest ebb when there were directly countervailing congressional statutes; thus, Truman couldn’t nationalize steel mills for the Korean war effort. Barron and Lederman are concerned with whether there is now some kind of new justification for Bush claiming he could ignore congressional limitations on troop rotations and other defense-related expenditures in time of war. Their short answer appears to be “no.” Their longer answer seems to be that “Commander in Chief” may ought to mean a good deal less than people these days think it means, something like “he who may delegate command decisions, but retains responsibility for them” rather than “he who may do anything he likes if he’s president and there’s a war on.” However, readers should consult actual constitutional lawyers before acting on this summary.

A Health Law with Holes (Robert Kuttner, American Prospect) *— Hmm. Using the Massachusetts “Commonwealth Connector” health insurance system as an example, Kuttner argues that Obama is right to oppose coercive mandates:

…the reform helps a great many uninsured but compounds a crisis that Dr. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, calls “coverage without care.” As employers and insurers contain their costs by shifting them to individuals, more people find that their insurance fails to pay many expenses when they are sick. [...]This idea of an individual mandate absent comprehensive reform - how to say this politely? - is nuts. It makes a social failure the problem of the individual. As Angell points out, “It gives the idea of government-sponsored universal coverage a bad name.”

Selected del.icio.us link dumps: clinton_hillary, obama, democratic_party, mccain, gop, impeachment, iraq, healthcare

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* UPDATE, 2/5: The Massachusetts law was mentioned by many Maryland District 20 candidates in 2006 in discussing how or whether to fix “Fair Share Health Care,” a plan mandating large corporate (read Wal-Mart, in immediate effect) healthcare expenditures equal to 8% of payroll.In comments, eRobin pointed to “Eye on MA,” a column by Ezra Klein that essentially echoed Kuttner’s reservations (“not my ideal. It’s an individual mandate, which is better than an employer mandate, but worse than instituting government-sponsored health care”).