Iraq and a hard place, still
Although I never agreed with Clinton's vote, always felt that the Bush League were leading the country by the nose on the rush to war with Iraq, I think she's in a real bind right now on admitting to that vote being a mistake, and don't really fault her for not copping to it, because the Right can run all over that, making it a campaign issue, another distraction from their own rotten record of obeisance to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rove's manipulations.
It could: 1) make her seem like a dupe for believing Bush's deception to begin with; 2) make her seem to be a flip-flopper (only Democrats are called this, it seems); 3) be used as an indictment of the troops; 4) be construed as an attack on her for supporting the incoherent, janus-headed policy to begin with ("how can you be against the war you supported?" -- the line they used against Kerry); 5) be seen as political cowardice, like finger-in-the-wind sentiment pollchasing.
I think she probably won't admit to it being a mistake for all of those reasons, and a few more. Like Obama's blackness, the "admit to a mistake" smoke-and-mirrors show is a diversion meant to indict the character of a candidate.
The ones who should be fessing up to mistakes are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove, and you'll never hear them do that, either. So why blame Hillary for it?
She (and many other Congresspeople) made the same mistake with their votes. She's got plenty of company. I wish she had shown more political courage back then, but 20/20 hindsight and all of that. I understand why she's not admitting to it as a mistake.
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