Frank Rich on Hillary's Outlook

Frank Rich gets right to the point in discussing Hilary's campaign this week. How does he feel about it? He titles his piece: "Hillary Clinton's Mission Unaccomplished." Despite her huge name recognition, which essentially keeps her at the forefront of the poles for the time being (although in an Iowa poll at the end of last month, she was running fourth, behind Edwards, Obama, and Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack), she's being outflanked by other politicians (such as Jim Webb) and even events themselves.

Polls continue to show Iraq dwarfing every other issue as the nation's No. 1 concern. The Democrats' pre-eminent presidential candidate can't escape the war any more than the president can. And so she was blindsided Tuesday night, just as Mr. Bush was, by an unexpected gate crasher, the rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. Though he's not a candidate for national office, Mr. Webb's nine-minute Democratic response not only upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by shooting, gave Mrs. Clinton a more pointed State of the Union "contrast" than she had bargained for.

To the political consultants favored by both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Bush, Mr. Webb is an amateur. More than a few Washington insiders initially wrote him off in last year’s race to unseat a star presidential prospect, the incumbent Senator George Allen. Mr. Webb is standoffish. He doesn't care whom he offends, including in his own base. He gives the impression — as he did Tuesday night — that he just might punch out his opponent. When he had his famously testy exchange with Mr. Bush over the war at a White House reception after his victory, Beltway pooh-bahs labeled him a boor, much as they had that other interloper who refused to censor himself before the president last year, Stephen Colbert.

But this country is at a grave crossroads. It craves leadership. When Mr. Webb spoke on Tuesday, he stepped into that vacuum and, for a few minutes anyway, filled it. It's not merely his military credentials as a Vietnam veteran and a former Navy secretary for Ronald Reagan that gave him authority, or the fact that his son, also a marine, is serving in Iraq. It was the simplicity and honesty of Mr. Webb's message. Like Senator Obama, he was a talented professional writer before entering politics, so he could discard whatever risk-averse speech his party handed him and write his own. His exquisitely calibrated threat of Democratic pushback should Mr. Bush fail to change course on the war — "If he does not, we will be showing him the way" — continued to charge the air even as Mrs. Clinton made the post-speech rounds on the networks.

Mrs. Clinton cannot rewrite her own history on Iraq to match Mr. Obama's early opposition to the war, or Mr. Webb's. She was not prescient enough to see, as Mr. Webb wrote in The Washington Post back in September 2002, that "unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation's existence is clearly at stake." But she's hardly alone in this failing, and the point now is not that she mimic John Edwards with a prostrate apology for her vote to authorize the war. ("You don't get do-overs in life or in politics," she has said.) What matters to the country is what happens next. What matters is the leadership that will take us out of the fiasco.

And that's a theme that Rich returns to again and again in this column. His argument is that while Hillary is looking for a palatable position to take, the country is looking for bold leadership that goes where it needs to, not where it can get away with.

This is how she explains her vote to authorize the war: "I would never have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly would not have voted for it." John Kerry could not have said it worse himself. No wonder last weekend's "Saturday Night Live" gave us a "Hillary" who said, "Knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it."

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The issue raised by the tragedy of Iraq is not who's on the left or the right, but who is in front and who is behind. Mrs. Clinton has always been a follower of public opinion on the war, not a leader. Now events are outrunning her. Support for the war both in the polls and among Republicans in Congress is plummeting faster than she can recalibrate her rhetoric; unreliable Iraqi troops are already proving no-shows in the new Iraqi-American "joint patrols" of Baghdad; the Congressional showdown over fresh appropriations for Iraq is just weeks away.

This, in other words, is a moment of crisis in our history and there will be no do-overs. Should Mrs. Clinton actually seek unfiltered exposure to voters, she will learn that they are anxiously waiting to see just who in Washington is brave enough to act.

The more we're seeing of Hillary, the more she's looking like another inside-the-Beltway sure thing that can't actually get out of the starting gate. It looks like we won't answer the question of whether America can elect a woman president this year, because it's looking more and more likely that we're not going to elect this woman.

[And a big Thank You goes out this week to donkey o.d. for breaking down the NYTimes subscription curtain; another goes to SC for sending an early e-mail with this column.]