Sullivan has an excellent piece on two neocons' (Robert Kagan and David Brooks) most recent and fitful reaction to President Obama's foreign policy of prudence, a piece in which he "fear[s] that the wisdom of Obama may not prevail in a future Clinton White House."
The fear is well founded and widely shared, though not widely enough. Democrats, I fear, are enthusiastically walking into a doom of their own making. Quite aside from Hillary's record of poor management skills--her last political campaign, alone, was enough of a mismanaged spectacle to shiver me timbers and thus lead me to positively dread the prospect of eight entire years of such top-level incompetence--her Bush-like, 2008 refusal to admit error in the general run-up to, and approval of, the monumentally catastrophic Iraq war was a studied miscalculation of enormous magnitude. She never backed off, she never apologized, she never conceded that either a) she had been duped by Dick Cheney or b) she had failed to review all the intelligence, much of which conflicted with the official screeds. This showed a frightening, Bushian inclination to "stay the course," no matter how conspicuously wrong she had been shown to be.
There's also a "c" possibility, which is this: She was neither duped nor unthorough; she simply voted "Aye" for war because she believed it to be smart politically, as far as presidential politics went. Politically. Thousands of lives hung (and eventually hanged) in the balance, and yet Hillary's chief concern was whatever worked for her aspirations.
OK, so presidential politics is a rough and often sociopathic game. I get it. In 2003, Joe Biden got it too, and was therefore in accord with Hillary on Iraq. But at least Joe had the decency to later apologize and retract his ambitious stupidity. Not Hillary. No, she dug in--again, Bush-like. And that scared the shit out of me, just as it did every other sobered Obama supporter.
I possess no illusions about avoiding a Clinton II. She has the money, the name, the networks, the endorsements, the state organizations and a kind of perpetual momentum. She has no credible opposition internally and for damn sure no credible opposition among Republicans. A Clinton White House is as much of a lock as Obama's was in '08. I also appreciate the uplifting, domestic possibilities of a Hillary Clinton White House working with a Democratically 2016-dominant Congress. The fear? The very real and quite justified fear? That a Clinton II White House will unravel President Obama's legacy of a prudent foreign policy. Hillary tilts to a neocon view of American power--and that inclination is seemingly incurable.
Democrats will escort Hillary to the White House in 2016. About that, I have no doubt. But they should do so with a bit less enthusiasm and far more wariness. For that will be Hillary's only constraint.