Hillary’s Iraq riff won’t fly

28 January 2007 |permalink | email article

Frank Rich has an op-ed in today’s NYT which skewers Hillary Clinton on her struggles to parse formulations about Iraq and suggests that the Democrat’s pre-eminent presidential candidate can’t escape the war any more than W. can. Excerpts:

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.”

Compounding this problem for Mrs. Clinton is that the theatrics of her fledgling campaign are already echoing the content: they are so overscripted and focus-group bland that they underline rather than combat the perennial criticism that she is a cautious triangulator too willing to trim convictions for political gain.

The image that Mrs. Clinton want to sell is summed up by her frequent invocation of the word middle, as in “I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America.” She’s not left or right, you see but exactly in the center where everybody feels safe.

The issue raised by the tragedy in Iraq is not who’s on the left or 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.

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.

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