While Republicans make the mistake of ONLY playing to the base in primary elections, Hillary Clinton is about to make the opposite mistake: telling voters who constitute "the base" to go fuck themselves:
yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.
“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).
At the same time, the level of Democratic anger has surprised some of her allies and advisers, and her campaign is worried about how long it will last and how much damage it might cause her.
“Some of her many advisers think she should’ve uttered the three magic words — ‘I was wrong’ — but she believes it’s self-evident that the Senate Iraq resolution was based on false intelligence and never should’ve come to a vote,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former United Nations ambassador and an adviser to Mrs. Clinton on foreign policy.
Sorry, but Hillary's blaming of "false intelligence" just doesn't hold water. Half a million people marching in New York City in 2003 knew the intelligence was bad, as did many others all over the country. Anyone who read something besides the war apologists at the Washington Post and Judy Kneepads Miller's lies in the New York Times knew. There is absolutely no excuse for anyone in Congress who took the notion that you don't go to war against a country that did nothing to you unless you are 100% certain that what you're seeing is correct. By the time of the Iraq war, the Bush Administration was already no longer deserving of anyone's "good faith". Hillary Clinton's claim that she was simply giving Colin Powell the leverage he needed to go before the UN is preposterous.
It may very well be that Terry McAuliffe is right, that because Hillary is in the pockets of the corporate interests and big donors, that money will trump all and she will have the nomination wrapped up by February. But if it's all about the money, then she doesn't represent me anyway. And frankly, a candidate who tells me to go fuck myself, who is still heedless of the truth about Iraq, and who refuses to give a truthful explanation (*cough* AIPAC *cough* corporate money *cough*) about why she refuses to recant her vote is not someone who deserves my support, and is not someone who would represent me if elected.
One of Hillary Clinton's biggest problems is an air of arrogance that has always surrounded her; a kind of scolding, "I know best" aura that has kept people from warming to her. I used to want to give her the benefit of the doubt, that she was just still the studious girl in the glasses who believed that her intellect was all she had to offer, so she blew that up to compensate for her lack of conventional allure. But this attitude shows that the arrogance is real.
This may yet work for her. There are some who will no doubt be swayed by Hillary Clinton's Big Swinging Dick attitude. But the last thing we need as we emerge from the dark night of a president whose decisions were driven by his need to prove something about how tough he was is another one with the same need, even if it comes from a different place.
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