While Hillary Clinton tries to spin herself out of the fact that she gave George Bush the green light to invade Iran, Nancy Pelosi has worked to put the brakes on this reckless adventure. The House Speaker said she will not let the Kyl-Lieberman Resolution come to a vote on the House floor, pointing out the unprecedented move of declaring a whole foreign army a "terrorist organization." Once again, the first woman Speaker and (possibly) the first woman President are on opposite sides of the neo-con agenda - like in 2002, when Senator Clinton voted for the Iraq War Resolution while Pelosi rallied her House colleagues against it. While history has proven Pelosi right, AIPAC and the neo-con cabal are bracing for another pre-emptive War with Iran - a larger country than Iraq whose U.S. occupation would create even worse consequences.
As I've written before, conservative pundits love Hillary Clinton and despise the party's liberal base. While Karl Rove and George Bush have predicted that she will win the nomination, there's a more basic reason why the right would be content with a President Hillary Clinton. It would not shift the political center of gravity, nor upset the current power structure where conservatives have flourished. In his October 12 column for the Washington Post, neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer lauded Hillary Clinton's candidacy - calling her the "Great Navigator." Never mind the rhetoric that she currently gives to win the primary, he said, for Hillary's "liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs." While many liberals currently support Clinton, the right understands that - in a year where Democrats will probably win the Presidency - Hillary is the best that they can hope for.
As the New York Times reported yesterday, in the past month Hillary Clinton has avoided taking direct questions from the public - sticking to a scripted campaign of stump speeches, talk show interviews, and fundraisers. Apparently, I'm not the only one whose question got under her skin - as this weekend, she had a testy exchange with an Iowan who asked why she voted to give Bush an excuse to invade Iran. As Clinton leads among Democrats who favor an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, it is to her obvious advantage that voters don't find out she's a war hawk - or else the "inevitability" of her nomination could be in doubt. But while Hillary avoids unscripted questions, one of her top supporters admitted that the Senator does not oppose the War in Iraq.
STATE BLOGS
