Accidental Blogger

The newly launched on line news site The Politico has conducted an interesting survey.  Current US senators were asked to respond to four questions about the Iraq war – then and now. The  questions are:

• Did you vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 2002?
• If you voted yes, do you regret your vote?
• Do you support the "surge?"
• Do you support a timetable / fixed date for withdrawal?

The response of all one hundred senators is tabulated here.   

An analysis of the answers reveals a lot about how the senators now feel about their original vote and what their calculations may be for the 2008 elections. Several hawkish Democrats who had supported Bush’s Iraq war policy in 2002, now regret having voted "yes." But not Hillary Clinton – she is playing a strange game, claiming to be "against" the war now but having "no regret" for enabling Bush in his immoral misadventures in 2002. Chris Bowers of Direct Democracy has analysed the votes of all 100 senators. This is what he says about the general mindset of US senators and Hillary Clinton in particular.

This is quite a survey. It means, among other things, that there are still at least forty-seven votes to authorize the war in Iraq, even now (the thirty-eight who don’t regret their vote plus the nine Republicans new to Congress). It also means we are still nowhere near a majority for a timetable, with sixty-seven members opposing the idea (and, as I noted, many of the Democrats who oppose a timetable are from the progressive end of the spectrum).

The biggest news, however, is that Hillary Clinton has just stated, flat-out, that she does not regret her war vote. At the same time, she is still trying to campaign as though she is against the war, claiming that she wouldn’t have started it, and that she would end it. Basically, it is the same thing we saw from Lieberman during the general election against Lamont: an absolute hawk trying to appear anti-war in order to pick up Democratic votes. Since most established news media outlets have basically become stenographers for campaign press releases, it might be very difficult to combat campaign rhetoric from someone who claims to be anti-war, but who doesn’t regret her vote to authorize the war in Iraq.

So Hillary does not regret having aided and abetted what she herself wouldn’t have started and would now work to end. How are we to reconcile these contradictory claims? Does she realize that in her efforts to not appear "Kerryesque," she now seems grotesquely "Clintonesque" in her verbal acrobatics? This is not just having one’s cake and eating it, it is expecting voters to bake it for her and put a delectable icing on it! Or is she is asking us again to have sympathy for her – a smart but earnest woman who repeatedly gets duped by devious, two timing men?

Many pundits have opined after the 2006 elections that given the untenable situation in Iraq and Bush-Cheney’s dogged incompetence, the 2008 presidential election is for the Democrats to lose.  With such glistening pearls of wisdom from the front runner, it seems that the Dems will manage the impossible again.