digamma.net - notes

Scott Lemieux speculates:

Admittedly, this is the kind of counterfactual that’s impossible to prove, but my guess is that if she had voted against the war Clinton would be the Democratic candidate. Given the closeness of the race, her inherent advantages going in, and that the war had to be a liability it’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have prevailed without the Iraq albatross.

Well, I guess. But that’s a radically different universe. If Clinton votes against the war in 2002, then voting against the war in 2002 is a mainstream position. Maybe more Democrats vote against the war. Maybe the war doesn’t happen, or it happens over their protests.

So when it goes wrong and the 2004 election rolls around, the Democratic candidate doesn’t have to flip-flop on the war because he was right about it all along. Maybe s/he loses, but you still don’t have this mass of Democrats looking for a change from the Washington establishment because, hey, the Washington establishment is doing in the the right thing.

But none of those things happened. In 2002 the Washington Democratic establishment was timid at best, hawkish at worst, as indeed they had been for all of Bill Clinton’s administration. Clinton’s war vote was perfectly in line with her career and her faction. If Hillary Clinton had voted against the war, she wouldn’t have been Hillary Clinton.