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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (35715)	3/24/2007 10:10:42 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541345

Bill Clinton Challenges the Netroots "Anti-War Crowd" Ari Melber blog In a conference call with major donors yesterday, former President Bill Clinton challenged the netroots for backing Barack Obama as an anti-war candidate, according to The Hill newspaper. While avoiding any direct criticism of Obama's statements, President Clinton said it was "ludicrous" to treat "Hillary and Obama's positions on the war as polar opposites." Then he tried to fact-check the netroots: "This dichotomy that's been set up to allow [Obama] to become the raging hero of the anti-war crowd on the Internet is just factually inaccurate." The Hill reports that President Clinton continued, "It's just not fair to say that people who voted for the resolution wanted war," and he argued that Hillary's defense of her war vote is similar to Chuck Hagel, who remains popular in the antiwar community. It is true that Chuck Hagel also claimed the Iraq resolution did "not quite" say the US should attack Iraq, and inspections might have still prevented war. That blurry defense has been tried by everyone from Hagel to Hillary to Kerry. But it is not the argument that won Hagel support from the antiwar crowd, and it probably won't work for Hillary. (Blogger Matt Browner-Hamlin once derided the whole approach as Hagel doing his "best John Kerry impersonation.") Americans don't want parsing history lessons, they want strong and principled leadership to end the war. That is why people support Hagel. And it's why people love Jack Murtha, who never spent time spinning his war vote. Once he determined the US could not achieve a military victory in Iraq's civil war, Murtha plowed all of his rhetorical and political energy into ending Bush's "flawed policy wrapped in illusion." So Bill Clinton's historical focus is unlikely to sway the netroots. "President Clinton has every right to question the depiction of his wife in all forms of media but, when it comes to what's hurting her about the Iraq war, he's really missing the point. John Edwards voted for the same resolution and it doesn't appear to be a drag on his campaign and that's due largely to what Edwards has said about the war since," explained blogger Bob Geiger in an email interview with The Nation. Geiger believes that Hillary's "play-it-safe strategy" and "her failure to be a strong, aggressive voice against the Bush administration is what's dragging down her candidacy, not a vote she made in 2002." Over at Booman Tribune, an international blog for the "progressive community," a new entry rebutting the former President acknowledged that "Hillary didn't want war," but offered little empathy: "The Big Dog can cry me a river. His wife gave the keys to the neo-cons and she knew better. Just like Kerry, she thought her future presidential viability depended on getting on the right side of a war." President Clinton was smart to notice the "antiwar crowd on the Internet," but their priority is foreign policy, not history.