A Victim Of Caricature And Her Own Excessive Caution

But more than other contenders for the next presidency, Senator Clinton is entangled in her 2002 vote backing the invasion, and her struggles to explain what she now believes. It has brought to the surface the wide resistance to her bid for the presidency. Some has been fired by the caricature and misogyny that she has provoked throughout her public life. The “I hate Hillary” faction has held against her either that she is Bill Clinton’s wife, or that she is not enough of a wife (or both, as my colleague Gerard Baker managed last week). It has found endless reason in the facts of her life to withhold from her the indulgence it extends to other politicians.

But the uncertainty about her beliefs is also a problem for Clinton. After two terms of ideology, Americans may find a prescription of pure passion and conviction an alarming formula — yet doubt about her guiding principles is costing her ground in the polls.

That isn’t new. When she ran for the Senate in 2000, I wrote about the pervasive unease about her candidacy; I picked up the torrent of readers’ e-mails soon afterwards when I was in Islamabad, startled that the vitriol on both sides eclipsed anything in the Pakistani press, itself not short of passion.

She reached the Senate — and has been an exemplary Senator for New York, re-elected by 67 per cent to 31 per cent in November over her Republican rival. Being a senator, in many ways, is the best job in US politics: stately six-year terms, and a chance to deliver tangible results — bridges, jobs — to voters. It has suited Clinton’s painstaking, detailed approach to the brief.

In the Senate Armed Services Committee, soon after the November elections, I saw her put those qualities impressively to work. She did by far the best job of the starry cast (John McCain, Edward Kennedy, Joe Lieberman, among others) in taking General John Abizaid to task for his testimony. You’re not exactly contradicting yourself, Clinton (a former lawyer) told him, but you’re allowing for every option without picking any.

That is now the charge against Clinton on Iraq. She explains her 2002 vote by saying: “I would never have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly would not have voted for it.” Her supporters winced at the apparent evasion; her detractors seized on the phrases as evidence of the political calculation they see in all her policies (as they do in her choice to stick by her husband).

That is a wilful distortion of motives. It is understandable that she might have chosen to save a long marriage and to revive her own career, after years as a consort in Arkansas and the Lewinsky humiliation. To claim that she banked on the sympathy that her husband’s treatment of her would engender presents it as a reliable political commodity, rather than the risky association it surely was.

Her faults are not those of cynicism but of excessive caution, of conviction that there is a “right answer” to be found, and of splitting policies into small pieces in that quest.

She does not have Bill Clinton’s gift of making the world seem bigger and more hopeful. Myopia and carefulness do not make for charisma, but after Bush, they are not a disqualification.

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