“I made a considered judgment, I didn’t make a speech, I made a decision and it was a decision based on my best assessment on what would be in the interest of our country at that very uncertain time.” <\/p>\n
Clinton said that historians will judge if her decision was the right one, but she reminded voters that Obama’s voting record on the war is not very different than hers. <\/p>\n
“When you want to compare, compare decisions so when Senator Obama came to the Senate, he and I voted exactly the same except for one vote and that happens to be the facts.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So far, so good. Over the last four years, Clinton’s and Obama’s votes on Iraq have<\/i> been nearly identical. She made a “considered judgment” six years ago, which turned out to be wrong, but when it comes to voting records, Clinton has a reasonable case to make — both she and Obama have been largely on the same page since ’04.<\/p>\n
But then, at the Oregon event yesterday, Clinton pushed the point a little too far.
\n<\/p>\n
Obama has been credited with foreseeing a troublesome war in Iraq primarily due to a speech he gave in 2002 while he was a state senator, where he spoke out against the war. Clinton said, “I started criticizing the war in Iraq before he did. So, I’m well aware that his entire campaign is premised on a speech he gave in 2002 and I give him credit for making that speech. But that was not a decision.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The notion that Obama has premised “his entire campaign” on a 2002 speech strikes me as pretty unfair, but it’s that first line that might raise a few eyebrows: “I started criticizing the war in Iraq before he did.”<\/p>\n
My hunch is that Clinton wishes she could take that one back, because she almost certainly didn’t mean it. Indeed, it contradicted her own remarks at the event — Obama warned in ’02 that the war would be a mistake, while Clinton was making a “considered judgment” that gave the White House the green light for war. She wasn’t criticizing the war before Obama, she was helping clear the way for war while Obama was urging the nation to follow a smarter course.<\/p>\n
I’m not inclined to hold Clinton’s ’02 vote against her. I’m also inclined to shrug my shoulders about Clinton’s reluctance to acknowledge that her vote was a mistake. But it’s discouraging that she was willing, at least yesterday, to start bragging about criticism she didn’t make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every Dem has to reach their own conclusion about how seriously to take senators’ 2002 votes authorizing Bush to go to war with Iraq. I try not to use the vote as a litmus test — John Kerry and John Edwards both went the wrong way on that vote, arguably for the wrong reasons, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}