Refighting Old Fights

Today, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were making competing appearances in Selma, Alabama, for the 42nd anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Frank Rich takes a look at some of the problems Hillary faces as we crawl along toward the primaries, still barely less than a year away. No matter how enthusiastic support for any of the leading candidates appears today, I'm afraid we're going to be very tired of all our choices by the time anybody actually starts casting and counting votes.

Hillary's main problem, as Rich sees it, is her vote on the Iraq War resolution and her continued defense of it. It's not the vote itself that's the problem, but how she continues to respond to it.

Senator Clinton's words about the war still don't parse. When I made this point previously, a Clinton ally phoned to say that whatever the senator's Iraq statements, she is an exceptionally smart and capable leader by any presidential standard. I agree, and besides, Iraq isn't the only issue in 2008. But Iraq will overshadow every candidate and every other subject as long as the war grinds gruesomely on, whether in Baghdad or at a V.A. hospital.

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?

Bob Graham, then Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, was publicly and privately questioning the W.M.D. intelligence. So was Nancy Pelosi. Chuck Hagel warned that the war was understaffed, that an Iraq distraction might cause Afghanistan "to go down again" and that the toppling of Saddam could be followed by chaos. Joe Biden convened hearings to warn of the perils of an ill-planned post-Saddam Iraq.

Some of these politicians ended up voting to authorize war exactly as Mrs. Clinton did (Senators Hagel and Biden). Some didn't. But all of them - and there were others as well - asked tougher questions and exerted more leadership.

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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?

Since she's not been able to sidestep the question, Rich suggests that she's trying to change the subject entirely. One political strategy (and military strategy, for that matter) that can sometimes work is to shift the fight to one you can win. We see that on a small scale when politicians supply rote answers to questions--it doesn't matter what they're asked, they're going to answer the way they want to (the real test is how well they pull it off and how quickly before listeners realize they never got the answer they wanted). So Hillary wants to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when criticisms of a candidate were personal rather than policy driven. In fact, Rich names his column, "Bring Back The Politics of Personal Destruction." He makes a good argument about the reaction of the Clinton camp to the David Geffen flap.

The most revealing aspect of the incident was not in any case the who's-up-who's-down prognostications for a primary process some 10 months away. Rather, it was the fervor with which the Clinton campaign accused Mr. Geffen and Mr. Obama of practicing "the politics of personal destruction." This over-the-top reaction seemed detached from reality, almost as if the Clinton camp were nostalgically wishing it could refight the last political war - and once again clobber repellent old impeachment nemeses. But that battle may not be in the offing. Anti-Clinton rage has cooled, and the Clinton hating industry ain't what it used to be. As The Times reported last month, even Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled much of the vast right-wing conspiracy, has moved on. As with Mr. Giuliani's marital history, any scandalous new revelation about the Clintons' private lives might play out less momentously in post-9/11 America than it did in the last century.

You can't blame the Clinton campaign for praying it had Kenneth Starr and The American Spectator to kick around again. It would be easier to fight that war than confront the one in Iraq. Far easier.

At this point, there's no way the Iraq war won't stop being an issue in the next presidential race (although I can think of a couple of ways it could change the way it plays), so everybody's going to have to get a bit creative in how they deal with it. Rich also takes a swipe at John Edwards while he's at it. In discussing how various senators provided leadership in questioning the war, he wrote:

John Edwards, by the way, did not: he was as trigger-happy about speeding up the war authorization then ("The time has come for decisive action") as he is gung-ho about withdrawal now, despite being an Intelligence Committee member when Mr. Graham sounded alarms about the Bush administration's W.M.D. claims.

Iraq can't be a single issue in determining who to support, but it casts a long, dark shadow over everything else.