On October 2, 2003, Senator John Kerry voted for an $87 billion appropriation to fund U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that was paired with rescinding some Bush tax cuts. It failed. Two weeks later, worried about Howard Dean's surging presidential campaign, Kerry joined only 11 other senators in voting against the $87 billion on final passage. Kerry later offered the immortal defense that he had voted for the $87 billion before voting against it.
On September 20, 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton voted for a convoluted Democratic resolution to condemn (without naming it) the ad in which MoveOn.org referred to the U.S. commander in Iraq as "General Betray Us," while also condemning attack ads from Max Cleland's 2002 Senate race and John Kerry's 2004 presidential run. (Power Line's John Hinderaker noted: "So, in the Democrats' view, General Petraeus is just another politician and MoveOn's slander is just another campaign ad.") The measure failed to get the requisite 60 votes. Later that day, worried about the party's leftist activists, Clinton (along with 23 other Democrats) voted against the following resolution:
To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.
This isn't the first time Hillary Clinton has voted for General Petraeus before voting against him. She voted to confirm him for his fourth star and his new position
on January 26, 2007, knowing that he would be executing a counterinsurgency strategy backed up by a surge of troops. Less than two months later, as the new strategy was just beginning to show results, she supported a motion to reverse course, begin to pull out troops, and abandon the new strategy.
Kerry's vote probably helped him overcome the Dean challenge in early 2004. It can't be an accident that Kerry and Edwards, two of the 12 senators who voted against the $87 billion on final passage, were the finalists in the Democratic race, while Joe Lieberman and Dick Gephardt, who voted for the $87 billion, got knocked out early. Perhaps Hillary Clinton is right to think that siding with MoveOn against General Petraeus will help her fend off the challenge of Barack Obama.
Or perhaps not. Obama refused to vote for or against the resolution condemning the MoveOn ad. He presented his refusal to vote as a principled stand against such a petty dispute: "The focus of the United States Senate should be on ending this war, not on criticizing newspaper advertisements." Obama continued, "By not casting a vote, I registered my protest against this empty politics."
Obama could afford to take this stand because he was against the war from the beginning. But Clinton has always been willing to do what it takes. In this instance it required silence in the face of MoveOn's slander of Petraeus. If one took the charges in the ad seriously, one would have to be in favor of relieving Petraeus of command. But Clinton has not called for that. She is not being serious about the war; she is trying to win the Democratic nomination. The Republican nominee in 2008 will be able to make the case that, as John McCain put it, "If you're not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilous, outrageous attack such as that, then I don't know how you're tough enough to be President of the United States."
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