Scenes from behind the TimesSelect wall

By Creature

Frank Rich asks the right questions:

The issue is not that Mrs. Clinton voted for the war authorization in 2002 or that she refuses to call it a mistake in 2007. Those are footnotes. The larger issue is judgment, then and now. Take her most persistent current formulation on Iraq: “Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn’t have been a vote and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.” It’s fair to ask: Knew what then? Not everyone was so easily misled by the White House’s manipulated intelligence and propaganda campaign. Some of her fellow leaders in Washington — not just Mr. Obama out in Illinois, not just Al Gore out of power — knew plenty in the fall of 2002. Why didn’t she? [...]

Another fair question is what Mrs. Clinton learned once the war began. Even in the summer of 2003 — after the insurgency had started, after the W.M.D. had failed to materialize, after the White House had retracted the president’s 16 words about “uranium from Africa,” more than two months after “Mission Accomplished” had failed to end major combat operations — she phoned a reporter at The Daily News, James Gordon Meek, to reiterate that she still had no second thoughts about the war. (Mr. Meek first wrote about this July 14, 2003, conversation in December 2005.) Was that what this smart woman really believed then, or political calculation?

Either way, she made a judgment, and she will not be able to spend month after month explaining it away to voters with glib, lawyerly statements. The politics of personal destruction, should they actually visit the Clintons once more, will not take America’s mind off the politics of mass destruction in Iraq.

Until Gore gets in the race, Obama is the only candidate* who took a clear stand against the war before the war. And, yes, this is my litmus test.

*The NYT a few weeks back published an Iraq war for/against list that is helpful here. While Richardson is opposed to the war now (using the horrible if-I knew-then-what-I-know-now line), it's unclear exactly where he was before the war. Kucinich was always against the war (and generally right about everything else), but the media (and the money) have labeled him as irrelevant and there is no way to fight this. Sorry, Dennis. Then there is Mike Gravel. He was opposed from day one, but the question begs to be asked: Who the hell is Mike Gravel?

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)