RICHARD COHEN COMES CLEAN. And does so with self-deprecating grace:
how come [Clinton] now says she did not think Bush, armed with a congressional resolution, would hurry to war?
I certainly did. It was about the only thing I got right about the war, which, the record will show, I supported. If I were running for the presidency, I might call my position "a mistake" and bray about being misled. But it was really a lapse in judgment. For reasons extraneous to this particular column, I thought the war would do wonders for the Middle East and that it would last, at the most, a week or two. In this I was assured by the usual experts in and out of government. My head nodded like one of those little toy dogs in the window of the car ahead of you.
Richard Cohen (as well as The Prospect's own Harold Meyerson) are quite right that Clinton is in a real bind. This is far worse than John Edwards's blogger bind, which his controversial hires solved for him, as predicted, by resigning. The longer Clinton refuses to say "I was wrong" or "I made a mistake," the more heat and anger she's going to generate on this topic, and the more she's going to be perceived just as President Bush now is, as someone who is too stubborn and proud to admit error. This will then spill over onto the likability question, and act as a poison spreading outward until it kills off her campaign during the primary season (barring the collapse of her opponents, of course).
In short, Clinton is suffering from being a senator. Her candidacy demonstrates once again, as if it needed further demonstration, why it is so difficult to win the presidency from that body's ranks. It is no accident, as Cohen points out, that all the senators now running for president voted for the Iraq War, and that all the congresspeople who voted against it have either chosen to not run (Russ Feingold) or are not taken particularly seriously as candidates (Dennis Kucinich). Had Clinton opposed the war earlier, she would have been as chewed up by now as Howard Dean, so tarred with the brush of terrorism-coddling that she'd have become, as Dean unjustly is, a national security punch line. A vote for the war was a pre-requisite for running for president. But now apologizing for that vote is, too.
Since the Clinton campaign is not given to sudden, abrupt movements, and since it is still very, very early in the cycle, I don't expect any sudden recantations. Once things heat up, however, and her opponents start pressing her directly on this point in forums, she'll either need to give a credible answer about why she won't say her vote was wrong, or say it.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
