MJ, the polls are saying she is the front-runner and already the attacks have started. Unprincipled, flip-flopper, corrupt etc. are soem of the terms being used against her. Some of it id due to her personality, some because of the baggage she carries.
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Hillary flip-flop on torture inspired after meeting generals
BY MICHAEL McAULIFF
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Friday, September 28th 2007, 4:00 AM
Hillary Clinton said that her opposition to torture was in part due to the inspiration of retired generals.
WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign yesterday belatedly explained that her flip-flop to oppose torture was an evolution inspired by talks with retired generals.
"Upon reflection and after meeting with former generals and others, Sen. Clinton does not believe that we should be making narrow exceptions to this policy based on hypothetical scenarios," said campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
Clinton (D-N.Y.) came out against all torture - "period" - in Wednesday's Democratic debate after previously telling the Daily News last October it would be okay to torture a terrorist to foil "something imminent."
Clinton's transformation on torture now aligns her perfectly with the voters she's trying to woo. A Zogby International poll this month found 64% of Americans oppose the interrogation tactic - and an earlier ABC poll showed more than 70% of Democrats are against it.
Clinton aides said she changed her mind after meeting in April with a group of retired three- and four-star generals.
But her epiphany appears to be incomplete. Clinton still hasn't signed a pledge with a group called the American Freedom Campaign that requested presidential candidates oppose all torture.
She and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are the only Democratic candidates who haven't signed on to the petition, launched in mid-August - well after she talked to the generals.
Obama, speaking to a crowd of several thousand people in Washington Square last night, pounced, saying, "There are folks who will shift positions and policies on all kinds of things depending on which way the wind is blowing."
Quipped Obama's top adviser, David Axelrod, "At least on this particular night, I thought she was less Yankee or Cub and more Dodger" - a play off her refusal to pick sides in a New York-Chicago World Series.
Republicans also piled on Clinton. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani hit her for shifting positions, while ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said Clinton's torture twist showed "fundamental weakness."
Clinton had one high-profile defender - her husband. "I loved her answers," former President Bill Clinton said.
What I meant was...
One candidate's cynical flip-flop is another's principled policy evolution. Like most presidential aspirants, Hillary Clinton has changed her tune on some issues:
"If we in Congress don't end this [Iraq] war before January 2009, as President I will," she said in February - after originally endorsing the war.
At Wednesday's debate, she ducked when asked if she would have all American troops out of Iraq by the end of her first term in 2013.
Clinton has been a vocal champion of civil liberties,
but in 2005 she introduced a bill with one of the Senate's most conservative Republicans that would have made flag-burning illegal.
In 2002 Clinton and others signed a letter arguing "there is no sound public policy reason for mandating the use of ethanol" in gasoline.
Last year she proposed an ethanol tax credit for gas station owners and now says, "I never was against using ethanol."
A resolute abortion-rights advocate, in 2005 Clinton called abortion "a sad, even tragic choice."
Since then she has said abortion should be legal, safe and rare.
Clinton has supported expanded legal immigration and backed legislation giving amnesty and permanent resident status to some illegal workers.
Nevertheless, in 2003 she told a radio interviewer, "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants."
nydailynews.com |
