Frank Rich: Senator Clinton's 'mission unaccomplished' on Iraq
RAW STORY
Published:
Sunday January 28, 2007
 In his latest column in the Sunday New York Times, Frank Rich takes aim at Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for trying to "rewrite her own history on Iraq to match" the positions held a long time before by other prominent Democrats, including at least one of her main rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).
"The Democrats' pre-eminent presidential candidate can't escape the war any more than the president can," Rich writes. "And so she was blindsided Tuesday night, just as Bush was, by an unexpected gate-crasher, the rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb."
Rich adds, "Though he's not a candidate for national office, Webb's nine-minute Democratic response not only upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by shooting, gave Clinton a more pointed State of the Union 'contrast' than she had bargained for."
"Clinton cannot rewrite her own history on Iraq to match Obama's early opposition to the war, or Webb's," Rich continues. "She was not prescient enough to see, as Webb wrote in The Washington Post back in September 2002, that 'unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake.'"
Excerpts from Rich column:
#
But she's hardly alone in this failing, and the point now is not that she mimic John Edwards with a prostrate apology for her vote to authorize the war. ("You don't get do-overs in life or in politics," she has said.) What matters to the country is what happens next. What matters is the leadership that will take us out of the fiasco.
Webb made his own proposals for ending the war, some of them anticipating those of the Iraq Study Group, while running against a popular incumbent in a reddish state. Clinton, running for re-election in a safe seat in blue New York, settled for ratcheting up her old complaints about the war's execution and for endorsing other senators' calls for vaguely defined "phased redeployments." Even now, after the Nov. 7 results confirmed that two-thirds of voters nationwide want out, she struggles to parse formulations about Iraq.
This is how she explains her vote to authorize the war: "I would never have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly would not have voted for it." John Kerry could not have said it worse himself. No wonder last weekend's "Saturday Night Live" gave us a "Hillary" who said, "Knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it."
#
NEW YORK TIMES SUBSCRIBERS CAN READ FULL RICH COLUMN AT THIS LINK
|
