DEBATES TO BE HAD.

DEBATES TO BE HAD. Lots and lotsa money raised by the presidential candidates this past quarter, of course, with Hillary Clinton leading the Democratic pack (and topping any of the Republicans' totals as well). The New York Times ran a piece about Bill Clinton's energetic participation in his wife's fundraising efforts, as he works to persuade wavering old friends and donors not to succumb to Obamamania. Apparently, one of his main tasks involves muddying the differences between the two senators' past stances on the Iraq war (something he had attempted to do directly with Times reporters recently):

"The Clintons thought the nomination would most likely be theirs, barring some major disaster, and they are having to work harder and earlier for the nomination than either Clinton expected," said the donor, who said he had talked about Mr. Obama with Mr. Clinton. "This was not how things were supposed to go, and they are obsessed with beating Barack in fund-raising."

At some fund-raisers, Mr. Clinton viewed part of his job as "explaining Hillary and Barack" to donors, in the words of one fund-raiser who talked to him -- laying out the rivals' positions on Iraq, for instance, in a manner that minimized their differences and made Mr. Obama appear less-than-consistently antiwar.

On a recent conference call with donors, too, Mr. Clinton gave a point-by-point analysis of the candidates' positions on the war in Iraq.

I think the argument Bill Clinton's been pushing about Obama's allegedly inconsistent comments about the from 2004 is as flatly unconvincing as the Clinton camps' efforts to muddy the waters on HRC's war position circa late 2002 and 2003. But backwards-looking debates about who said what, while important, are of only limited utility, and presumably soon we should be able to move on to at least somewhat more specific forward-looking discussions concerning the views of the candidates on various foreign policy issues.

There is, for instance, the question of drawing down the war in Iraq. Senator Clinton proposes keeping a significant residual force in Iraq indefinitely, and frames her proposal in ways that set off some alarm bells among those of us already disposed to find Clinton and her circle of foreign policy thinkers too hawkish for our taste. But Obama and John Edwards, of course, have also described leaving some troops in the country following a major withdrawal and/or retaining "over-the-horizon" capacity to redeploy there. All of these suggestions are a bit vague. Are there substantive differences between Obama's views on this issue and Clinton's? This is a debate that ought to be hashed out. (Of course, Senator Clinton's efforts to assure Democratic donors and primary voters that she really is in favor of bringing the war to an end, ratcheting back the hostility and paralysis that currently define our Mid-East posture on any number of fronts, reinvigorating good-faith American diplomacy throughout the world, etc., may be hampered by the simultaneous need to address lingering -- and utterly absurd and unfounded -- suspicions that she's weak and "anti-military." This is hardly an insurmountable bind, but it's a real one.)

--Sam Rosenfeld