Words From a Wicked Woman

Maggie Williams

There’s trouble in Hillaryland. Two top officials have left Democratic hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in the last week amid a shake-up on the heels of eight straight primary season losses to challenger Sen. Barack Obama since Super Tuesday. On Sunday, campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle stepped down and was replaced by longtime Clinton loyalist and fixer Maggie Williams, and; Tuesday, NBC reported that deputy campaign manager Mike Henry was “stepping down to allow campaign manager Maggie Williams to build her own team.” But with Obama accumulating ever-more substantial victories, is this change in staff too little too late?

According to “Inside the Clinton Shake-up” on Atlantic.com, Solis Doyle was fired in favor of Williams, even though the latter has never run a campaign. During the Clinton White House, for some, Williams was the quiet, earnest aide to the president and chief of staff to Hillary; to others, she was the one donors called if they wanted access to the First Couple. However, to the Clintons, Williams was the faithful partisan who got her hands dirty so they didn’t have to. It was that last part of her job description that earned her a subpoena from the House Government Oversight Committee in 1997 to explain what access might have been purchased by suspect Clinton and Democratic Party fundraiser Jimmy Chung’s $366,000-plus contribution.

Although Williams was never indicted, Chung was. He pleaded guilty to election law violations in 1998, whereupon his attorney, Brian Sun, said, “Mr. Chung has reached an agreement with the government. Mr. Chung wants to put this matter behind him as quickly as possible. He and his family are looking forward to getting on with their lives.”

Chung was known to have physically handed over a large portion of his contribution–at least $50,000 according to CNN–to Williams in the White House, a site he visited on almost 50 occasions. One of these occasions had him watching as President Clinton taped his weekend address along with an interesting group of friends that included the head of the Chinese government’s oil monopoly.

Williams, described by one ally as the “queen of Hillaryland,” according to the Washington Post, “is said to have improved the mood and inspired confidence within the campaign and its donor base. “Hillaryland,” a term ironically coined by Solis Doyle while serving as Clinton’s scheduler when she was first lady, is the group of close female allies and confidants with which the candidate surrounds herself.

“They needed some kind of jolt at this point of time,” Nadadur Vardhan, a Los Angeles-based financial consultant and Clinton fundraiser, told the Washington Post. “At least in terms of perception, this makes people like me feel that they’re conscious of the fact that something drastic has to be done.”

In another drastic move, Clinton revealed last week that she’d loaned her campaign $5 million of her own money to keep it going. She further reports she’s raised double that much and more since making the announcement.

Obama’s victories must have been distressing enough for the Clinton campaign, but perhaps even more alarming was that Obama won voter groups in the Chesapeake Primary held February 12 previously considered Clinton strengths. For example, women voters were considered her inviolate constituency. However, according to CNN’s Virginia exit polls, Obama won 60% of the female vote overall while Clinton only won among white women, the single largest voting bloc. Even there, Clinton’s six-point margin among that group was less than usual.

Moreover, although voters over 45-years-old have tended to vote for Clinton in previous contests, according to the New York Times’ Virginia exit polls, Obama carried every age group in the state. The same is true for voters with incomes below $50,000 per year and those without college degrees–two groups that Clinton has consistently captured but that now appear to be in play.

Those trends continued in Maryland and Washington, D.C.

In an apparent move to stem the hemorrhage, it appears that Clinton’s message may be changing from “Ready on Day One” to “Solutions,” in reference to Obama’s clear talent for giving uplifting and inspiring speeches but a tendency seen by some to be less than specific in his plans for execution of policy. If so, the change may or may not come from Williams. According to the Atlantic.com article, the campaign’s resident Karl Rove-like figure remains Mark Penn, a pollster who has served as chief strategist and been responsible for her overall message.

It is too soon to determine whether either the staff shake-up or the new message are having any impact. What is known is that Obama is ahead by an average of only 4.3% in the latest Wisconsin primary polls according to RealClearPolitics.com. Oddly enough, even though she is competitive in that state, the Clinton campaign has all but abandoned it in favor of primaries in Texas and Ohio where her campaign feels (and numbers agree) she must win big on March 4 if she is to catch up to Obama’s delegate count.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Clinton has a 10.3% average lead in the latest polls according to RealClearPolitics.com. However, a poll conducted by the American Research Group (ARG) on February 13 and 14, and not included in the RealClearPolitics.com average, has Obama ahead of Clinton 48% to 42%. The numbers within the numbers are interesting, to say the least. USAElectionPolls.com quotes ARG:

Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama among self-described Democrats 47% to 42%. Obama leads Clinton among self-described independents and Republicans 24% to 71%. Obama leads among men 55% to 29% (47% of likely Democratic primary voters) and Clinton leads among women 54% to 42%. Clinton leads Obama among white voters 51% to 40% (53% of likely Democratic primary voters), Obama leads Clinton among African American voters 76% to 17% (22% of likely Democratic primary voters), and Clinton leads Obama among Latino voters 44% to 42%.

22% of likely Democratic primary voters say they would never vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and 20% of likely Democratic primary voters say they would never vote for Barack Obama in the primary. 30% of men say they would never vote for Clinton in the primary.

Clinton and Obama are virtually tied among Latino voters–said to be about 18% to 20% of all voters in 2002 and 2004 according to the William C. Velasquez Institute. This is in marked contrast to the belief that Latinos will not vote for a black candidate. It may be that Obama is continuing to attract Latino voters as he did in the Chesapeake Primary where he won that group in all three contests.

The statistic for independents and Republicans could prove very beneficial in the general election if Obama secures the Democratic nomination.

Ohio looks better for Clinton. In the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls, she leads Obama by 17.3%. That is an improvement for Obama, who was behind 42% to 19% in a poll conducted by the Columbus Dispatch between January 23 and 31 and reported by USAElectionPolls.com.

Perhaps the smaller margin between the two candidates is why, given the choice between Texas and Ohio, Clinton has chosen to focus most of her attention on the former, campaigning largely in the Rio Grande Valley. She’s sent daughter Chelsea to Ohio on a tour of universities around the state Wednesday and Thursday. The candidate herself dropped in Thursday and Friday.

Obama is in the midst of fighting to win the Wisconsin primary next Tuesday with appearances throughout that state. His home state, Hawaii, also holds its primary that day. He is, one imagines, expected to win.

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Recording artist will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, son of singer/icon Bob Dylan, got together with a group of musicians, actors and personalities over the course of two days to mold music written by the Black Eyed Peas founder to words from Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s New Hampshire “Yes We Can” speech into a song of hope, unity and inspiration. It is a video that sends chills down the spine of the jaded and brings tears to the eyes of cynics. Best of all, will.i.am, Dylan and friends did all of this unbidden. This video, and its making, is indicative of the inspiration Obama engenders.

Today is known throughout the country as “Super Tuesday.” Democrats, Republicans and Independents across 24 states will go to the polls to vote for the candidate they want to see as their party’s presidential nominee. The reasons any one person will cast their vote for a particular candidate are myriad, however, I would like to discuss a few of the reasons Barack Obama has inspired so many people and deserves your support.

Barack Obama can change the status quo

Washington is a mess. There’s no getting around it. Legislators are often unresponsive to their constituents’ desires, instead, preferring to grant the wishes of lobbyists and other big campaign donors; very little gets accomplished in Congress because of inter- and intra-party spats and rivalries; there is no unifying vision of where this country needs to go, and; even when there is unity of purpose and vision, there is someone in the White House determined to stand in the way. Today, when many people think of Washington, D.C., they think of a quagmire of lost hope.

Those who support Obama are tired of politics as usual and believe he brings a singular freshness. He is an African-American elected by a largely white, moderate to conservative majority in Illinois because he has a vision of what this country can be. He hasn’t been in and around Washington for decades adding to the morass on Capitol Hill, making it what it is. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison captured the essence of Obama’s value to this country when she wrote in a letter to the senator, “[I]n addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don’t see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”

That wisdom was born, in part, because he is America–multiracial, multicultural and multiethnic–the beautiful quilt of this country’s lost amibition. As such, he brings a view that is more expansive and inclusive than we’ve seen before. It is a view that says we can be gracious and talk to those we don’t like (and who don’t like us) instead of pointing a gun at them first and that we must engage countries and people to bring about progress. According to Obama, “On challenges ranging from terrorism to disease, nuclear weapons to climate change, we cannot make progress unless we can draw on strong international support.” Yes we can.

Barack Obama can bring people together

Obama truly believes all people really are created equal and that blacks, browns, yellows and reds can work together to enable this country to reach its potential. In an election cycle that has been marred by racial code intended to inflame, it is time to see beyond the divisiveness of racial politics. That does not mean we should forget our heritage. Indeed, we must acknowledge and celebrate our different cultures, but not allow them to trap us into a mental, spiritual, intellectual OR gender ghetto that separates us from our common goals.

Much has been made of the notion that Latinos will not support Obama in California and the rest of the Southwest because there is a rivalry between blacks and browns. However, the people who have posited this theory forget the reality that Obama has been endorsed by the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, La Opinion, saying:

Senator Barack Obama represents fundamental change in a campaign in which ‘change’ has become a central theme. Obama’s approach to immigration and his inspiring vision are what the country need to break through the current feeling of political malaise.

. . .

It is this commitment to the immigration issue which drove Obama to condemn the malicious lies made during the immigration debate, to understand the need for driver’s licenses, and to defend the rights of undocumented students by co-authoring the DREAM Act. The senator has demonstrated character by maintaining his position despite the hostile political climate.

. . .

We need a leader today that can inspire and unite America again around its greatest possibilities. Barack Obama is the right leader for the time.

The senator’s hometown Spanish-language newspaper, La Hoy, also endorsed him. This is the first time the Chicago newspaper has endorsed any presidential candidate. “The son of an immigrant father and an American mother, Obama knows the challenges facing those deprived of privileges, when facing the uphill climb to success. . . . The Senator is capable of compromising with those who think differently, and has the strength to renew the hopes of those who have come to this country in search of a better life. . . . We, the Latinos, are a mostly young population, with great dreams and hunger for success. For that reason we consider that Barack Obama is the Democratic Party’s best option, to give back to the country a national unity that includes Hispanic talent.”

As La Hoy mentioned, Obama not only brings people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds together, but also those of different ideologies. It is, perhaps, one of his most defining qualities. As he noted in his South Carolina victory speech, “[Obama supporters] are Democrats from Des Moines and independents from Concord and, yes, some Republicans from rural Nevada.” In the very speech from which the above video was made, he emphasizes the diversity of his coalition but says the thing they all have in common is they are people who, “are tired of the division and distraction that has clouded Washington, who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable, who understand that, if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that stood in our way and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there is no problem we cannot solve, there is no destiny that we cannot fulfill.” We can be–we must be–a UNITED States of America. Yes we can.

Barack Obama can end the Iraq War

According to Antiwar.com, there have been 3945 U.S. casualties since the Iraq War began March 19, 2003; 3806 of those have come since President George W. Bush arrogantly and foolishly stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared “Mission accomplished!” on May 1, 2003. In stark contrast to anyone else running for either party’s presidential nomination, Barack Obama has never supported the war.

At an anti-war rally held in Chicago on October 2, 2002, then-State Senator Barack Obama made the following remarks:

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear - I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east (sic), and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

I encourage reading entire speech here.

In the wee hours of October 11, 2002, Sen. Hillary Clinton, the other candidate for the Democratic party presidential nomination, in bold relief to Obama’s position, voted to send American troops into Iraq, thus beginning the Iraq War. Literally minutes prior to her vote authorizing the war, she voted against the Levin amendment to the authorization. The Levin amendment would have reigned the administration in and encouraged it to work with other nations before then coming back to Congress to ask for authorization. For a full discussion of the Levin amendment see my previous post “Obama Cordially Hangs Clinton on Iraq in Pre-Super Tuesday Debate.”

Obama has offered a plan to bring one or two brigades a month home from Iraq with full withdrawal completed within 16 months. Clinton will not commit to a timetable even though she says that she now favors ending the war.

Although Obama wants to end the Iraq War, he stated in the February 2, 2008 Los Angeles debate with Clinton, “I think it is important for us to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. . . . but I do think it is important for us to set a date. And the reason I think it is important is because if we are going to send a signal to the Iraqis that we are serious, and prompt the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds to actually come together and negotiate, they have to have clarity about how serious we are.” We must get out of Iraq as carefully as possible and as soon as possible. Yes We Can.

In Conclusion

For some candidates, this presidential campaign season began years ago. And, for some, it has ended too soon. I think we can all agree that parts of it have been extremely ugly, but there have also been times that have inspired hope where once there was none. Those latter times have, most often, been inspired by Barack Obama–a uniquely transformative agent of aspiration and change. He looks at this country and its people and sees what is possible with faith, belief in ourselves and a generous spirit. He rejects the politics of fear which turns into the politics of “mean.” As a result, people are valuable not because they are of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, income status or sexual orientation. They are valuable because they are human beings who deserve to be heard and counted.

Today is almost at an end. If you live in a Super Tuesday state and you have not voted yet, please do so. But, before you pull that lever or press a touchscreen or fill in a bubble, realize that today is a new day. It is a day when we have a chance to propose a man with the courage to dream, the belief that we can be better than we are and the audacity of hope. He did not sit in the Senate in Washington wringing his hands, wondering what he should do while we languished in malaise. Instead, on February 10, 2007, on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln once called on a divided nation to stand together, Sen. Barack Obama entered the race for president of the United States and asked us to stand together with him to change this country and the world. Some say that he should wait his turn, that he hasn’t paid his dues and that he doesn’t have the experience. They expect him to defer to others who, frankly, don’t have the vision or skills to be a unifying force to correct the mistakes made by the current administration. Instead, he saw that waiting would only allow the country to sink deeper into the abyss, making recovery that much harder. He understood what Martin Luther King, Jr. called in his “I Have A Dream” speech the “urgency of now.”

The reality is that the differences between Clinton and Obama are few. Nevertheless, they are significant. In my mind, perhaps the most astounding difference overall is that the latter can unite while the former has a disturbing tendency to divide and to do so in a profoundly ugly way. In this new day that is today, we need to put aside our racial, cultural, ethnic and gender politics in favor of moving this country forward in a healthy way that will restore our prestige throughout the world. It will take boldness, courage, imagination and brilliance. Barack Obama has those characteristics in abundance. He believes: Yes we can! ¡Sí se puede! I believe, with your vote today: Yes, we can win!

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The headline from last Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the only two candidates remaining after John Edwards ended his campaign earlier this week, are something just shy of BFFs who got together at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood with a few thousand of their closest friends to discuss select topics of the day. Really. At least, that’s what they wanted to convey.

Obama stated in his opening remarks, “I . . . want to note that I was friends with Hillary Clinton before we started this campaign; I will be friends with Hillary Clinton after this campaign is over.”

If I were a cynic I’d say the level of “nice” was saccharin, to say the least. That is, it was synthetically sweet in a joint move to appease the viewing public and promote party unity. Does anyone actually buy that they aren’t trying to kill each other–at least at the polls? The debate took place a mere five days before the cluster of 24 primaries and caucuses known as Super Tuesday and new polls showed that Obama had narrowed the gap behind Clinton to three points in California, the state with the most delegates. If ever there was a time to get testy, this was it. I have two words in case anyone has a short memory: South Carolina.

Although there were no fireworks, Obama did not fail to remind the audience what this primary contest is about. “I don’t think the choice is between black and white or it’s about gender or religion. I don’t think it’s about young or old. I think what is at stake right now is whether we are looking backwards or we are looking forwards. I think it is the past versus the future.”

The debate, sponsored by CNN and Politico.com, was moderated by the cable channel’s Wolf Blitzer with questions coming from Blitzer, the Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus and Politico’s Jeanne Cummings. For the debate’s first question, McManus asked Clinton, “What do you consider the most important policy distinction between the two of you?”

Clinton responded, “Well, I want to start by saying that whatever differences there are among us, between us now . . . the differences between Barack and I pale in comparison to the differences that we have with Republicans, and I want to say that first and foremost, because it’s really a stark difference.” This was a recurring theme throughout the night.

However, she said there are differences, including their approach to foreign affairs. “I believe that we’ve got to be realistic and optimistic, but we start with realism in the sense that we do have serious threats, we do have those who are, unfortunately and tragically, plotting against us, posing dangers to us and our friends and our allies.”

In answer to Obama’s repeated assertion that we should talk to people and countries who don’t necessarily like us as opposed to simply shooting at them, Clinton countered, “I think that we’ve got to have a full diplomatic effort, but I don’t think the president should put the prestige of the presidency on the line in the first year to have meetings without preconditions with five of the worst dictators in the world.”

Obama agreed with Clinton’s view that one of their differences was foreign policy; particularly, Iraq.

“I was opposed to Iraq from the start,” he reminded. “And . . . I say that not just to look backwards, but also to look forwards, because I think what the next president has to show is the kind of judgment that will ensure that we are using our military power wisely.

He continued, “It is true that I want to elevate diplomacy so that it is part of our arsenal to serve the American people’s interests and to keep us safe. And I have disagreed with Senator Clinton on, for example, meeting with Iran. . . . [T]he national intelligence estimate, the last report suggested that if we are meeting with them, talking to them, and offering them both carrots and sticks, they are more likely to change their behavior. And we can do so in a way that does not ultimately cost billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and hurt our reputation around the world.”

The Politico’s members later voted to ask Clinton a question they felt went to her judgement in voting for the Iraq War. Specifically, they asked about her vote against the Levin amendment–an amendment to the bill authorizing U.S. military action in Iraq introduced by Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin.

To understand the question, it is important that one understand the proposed amendment. In a speech delivered October 4, 2002 on the floor of the Senate, Levin explained what it said:

• It urges the U.N. Security Council to adopt promptly a resolution that:
  • Demands unconditional access for U.N. inspectors so that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and prohibited ballistic missiles may be destroyed; and
  • Within the same U.N. resolution, authorizes the use of necessary and appropriate force by U.N. member states to enforce such resolution in the event Iraq refuses to comply.
• It also specifically authorizes the use of United States Armed Forces pursuant to that U.N. Security Council resolution if Iraq fails to comply with its terms, provided the President informs the Congress of his determination that the United States has used appropriate diplomatic and other peaceful means to obtain compliance by Iraq with such U.N. resolution.
• My resolution affirms that, under international law and the U.N. Charter, the United States has at all times the inherent right to use military force in self-defense, affirming the fact that there is no U.N. veto over U.S. military action.
• My resolution affirms that Congress will not adjourn sine die so that Congress can return to session to consider promptly proposals relative to Iraq if, in the judgment of the President, the U.N. Security Council does not adopt the resolution mentioned earlier.
• Finally, my resolution provides that the President report to Congress every 60 days on the status of efforts to have the U.N. Security Council adopt such a resolution and, if such a resolution is adopted, to obtain compliance by Iraq with the resolution.

The point of the amendment was to unite world opinion into one voice against Saddam Hussein and avoid the appearance of the U.S. “going it alone” without giving diplomacy a chance. However, had the Security Council failed to act, Congress could “consider promptly proposals relative to Iraq.” Ultimately, the amendment was defeated 24-75.

In justifying her vote, Clinton made the most controversial statement of the night. “The way that amendment was drafted suggested that the United States would subordinate whatever our judgment might be going forward to the United Nations Security Council. I don’t think that was a good precedent. Therefore, I voted against it.

“You know, I’ve said many times if I had known then what I know now, I never would have given President Bush the authority,” Clinton added, almost wistfully. “It was a sincere vote based on my assessment at the time and what I believed he would do with the authority he was given. He abused that authority; he misused that authority. I warned at the time it was not authority for a preemptive war. Nevertheless, he went ahead and waged one, which has led to the position we find ourselves in today.”

Her assertion that the Levin amendment would have subordinated presidential and congressional judgement in favor of that from the U.N. Security Council has been widely disputed in the aftermath of the debate.

“This was not just a vote about Saddam Hussein. It was about the United Nations and international support,” former Congressman Tom Andrews told The Huffington Post. Andrews, who now heads the group Win Without War, explained, “It did not, in any way, impede or impose on the sovereignty of the United States.”

John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World further clarified, “It basically said we should go to the United Nations and get approval as the first George Bush did… Levin was correct and Hillary Clinton is incorrect in what she said last night. It would not have hamstrung the United States. “

Analysis in the Checkpoint column of the February 2, 2008 edition of the New York Times gives the most concise explanation I’ve found so far:

The amendment was designed to rein in the president, who many believed was embarked on an inexorable march to war. The measure required two steps. First, the United Nations would have to pass a resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq if it did not permit thorough inspections of its weapons programs. Second, the amendment required the president to return to Congress if his United Nations efforts failed and to secure passage of what Mr. Levin called a “going-it-alone unilateral resolution.”

Former Senator Lincoln D. Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, who was in the Senate at the time and supported the Levin amendment, wrote last year that the measure was “unambiguous and compatible with international law.”

“Ceding no rights or sovereignty to an international body, the amendment explicitly avowed America’s right to defend itself if threatened,” Mr. Chafee wrote in The New York Times. He said the demand for thorough inspections in Iraq would succeed only if pushed by a broad coalition, including Arab states.

Chaffee recalled that the vote took place only four weeks before midterm elections and that the vote to authorize military action, which took place the same night as the vote on the Levin amendment, was practically a mirror image of the latter–approved 77-23.

Later, Clinton described the atmosphere that permeated her reasoning. “I think that if you look at what was going on at the time — and certainly, I did an enormous amount of investigation and due diligence to try to determine what if any threat could flow from the history of Saddam Hussein being both an owner of and a seeker of weapons of mass destruction.

“The idea of putting inspectors back in — that was a credible idea. I believe in coercive diplomacy. I think that you try to figure out how to move bad actors in a direction that you prefer in order to avoid more dire consequences.

“I think what no one could have fully appreciated is how obsessed this president was with this particular mission. And unfortunately, I and others who warned at the time, who said, let the inspectors finish their work, you know, do not wage a preemptive war, use diplomacy, were just talking to a brick wall.”

That last statement–that no one could have appreciated how obsessed Bush was with going to war–led CNN’s Blitzer to ask if she was saying that she was naive in trusting the president, leading to a non-answer that attempted to shift the focus to subsequent Senate votes once troops were on the ground.

“The point is that I certainly respect Senator Obama making his speech in 2002 against the war. And then when it came to the Senate, we’ve had the same policy because we were both confronting the same reality of trying to deal with the consequences of George Bush’s action.

“Some people now think that this was a very clear open and shut case. We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors. We had evidence that they had a lot of bad stuff for a very long time which we discovered after the first Gulf War,” she obfuscated.

Then, in the night’s surest WTF moment, she went on to rationalize, “Knowing that he was a megalomaniac, knowing he would not want to compete for attention with Osama bin Laden, there were legitimate concerns about what he might do. So, I think I made a reasoned judgment. Unfortunately, the person who actually got to execute the policy did not.”

No one asked a follow-up question, however, if one takes Clinton’s words at face value, she was afraid that Hussein would get jealous of bin Laden and pull something horrendous simply to get attention. That logic boggles the mind.

When Obama finally had the opportunity to address Clinton’s rather obtuse reasons for voting to authorize the Iraq War, he reminded the audience, “[T]he authorization had the title, an authorization to use U.S. military force, U.S. military force, in Iraq. I think everybody, the day after that vote was taken, understood this was a vote potentially to go to war.” In actuality, the title was “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” but he was close enough.

Clinton will never be able to explain her vote to anyone’s satisfaction. Her only hope in getting out from under this is admitting her mistake, especially since she’s now against the war. As long as she keeps trying to explain her actions with increasingly bizarre rationalizations, she will always be open to criticism from any opponent, regardless of what side that opponent is on. That she voted for the war in the first place and then refused to admit her mistake speaks directly to her judgment as well as to her style of leadership. We currently have a president who steadfastly refuses to admit his errors, simply continuing down the same path whether that path is right or wrong. Some view this inflexibility as strength, however, I submit that an enlightened and mature leader admits mistakes and moves on. Clinton cannot move on because she has yet to admit her mistake even while she says she’s now against the very action she authorized. If that doesn’t speak to her judgment, I don’t know what will.

Perhaps an oft-used line from the Obama campaign is instructive in its insight as he offers, “Senator Clinton, I think, fairly, has claimed that she’s got the experience on day one. And part of the argument that I’m making in this campaign is that, it is important to be right on day one.” (Emphasis mine.)

Truer words were never spoken–BFFs be damned.

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