WEAK OR WRONG? Tom writes that, "the 2002 war vote, instead of making [Hillary] look tough on defense, makes Hillary look like somebody too weak to stand up to a president and, thus, perhaps, too weak to be one." I think that's rather wrong. First, I think as a general rule (I know Tom doesn't mean it in a gendered way), "weak," with a woman candidate, is a word sort of like "articulate" with a black one, and we should be careful with it. A lot of Democrats voted for that war, and no one is calling Ben Nelson, or John Edwards, or Joe Lieberman, or Richard Gephardt, weak. Meanwhile, I don't think Hillary was weak, I think she was wrong. All evidence suggests that she's a fairly genuine liberal interventionist type, rather hawkish on issues of intervention and military deployment. That's fine. And her current unwillingness to say she was wrong comes, one might imagine, not because she's weak, but because she doesn't think she was wrong. As she's said very clearly, knowing what she knows now, voting for the war would have been foolhardy. But she's been careful not to say that knowing what she knew then, the war still should've been a mistake. This isn't a weak position, it's just a wrong one. The problem, for her, seems to be that the intelligence was wrong and the war was bungled, not that it was an ill-considered idea from the outset. --Ezra Klein
