Stoller thinks Daou's triangle is closing on Hillary. Until this weekend, I'm not sure I would have agreed. But driving home from work this afternoon, I heard an NPR report on her trip to New Hampshire, and it really made me think.
If she were running against a group made up only of Iraq war supporters, "if I knew then what I know now, but anyway, Bush screwed it up not me" line might have worked. But with John "I was wrong" Edwards and Barack "I was against the war from the beginning" Obama as her major rivals, a tortured explanation like this will never work.
Yes, of course, I'm all for blaming Bush. But if you voted to give him authorization for this war, you directly enabled him. That isn't Bush's fault; that's yours. Edwards has owned up to his mistake. So far, Hillary has not.
"I was wrong" shouldn't be so hard to say. That it is tells you something very, very important about Hillary. And really, do we really want 4 more years of a president that cannot admit a mistake? Really?
Anyway, I think Stoller's point about Hillary being unprepared for an attack from the left is incredibly important. Triangulation isn't going to work this time around. In 1992, Bill's opponents were more than willing to let him triangulate. This time around, we all know we can do better.
When the dominant political ideology is still strong, triangulation is often the only option. But when it is on the ropes, triangulation is the political equivalent of throwing it a lifesaver. And why anyone would want to throw conservatism a lifesaver is beyond me.
UPDATE: Greg Sargent has the full text of the speech Hillary gave just prior to her vote giving the president the authority to go to war.
And Greg is right... taken out of context it might appear to some to be a strong statement. But in context it is anything but. As Maureen Dowd wrote a few weeks back, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention at the time that Bush wanted his war. "If I knew then what I know now" is just a lame excuse. I knew, and I'm just a citizen blogger. What's Hillary's excuse?
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