From a Wall Street Journal news story, I give you a collective paraphrase and one quoted assessment of Hillary Clinton's State Department tenure. The paraphrase:
[Mrs. Clinton] was more comfortable than Mr. Obama with the use of military force and saw it as an important complement to diplomacy, present and former administration aides say.
The quote, from Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser:
In the debates that we had, she generally was someone who came down in favor of military action. She had a comfort with U.S. military action.
This reporting brings us up to date: The tension stands unaltered and unabated from 2008. Obama was, and remains, wary of U.S. military engagement; Clinton was, and is, "comfortable" with it.
Some Obama supporters are twisting themselves into positions of excruciating hope that Hillary has learned from her time at State and tutorage from a militarily skeptical president. I submit that nothing has changed in the last six years--that Hillary, for whatever reasons, from either convictions or politics, remains an unapologetic advocate of military force. But of course I don't need to submit it. Ben Rhodes and "former administration aides" already have.
I find this chilling, as well as a circle that simply can't be squared. Obama soared to Democratic supremacy in 2008 because Clinton had dug in. Notwithstanding the grotesque, bleeding reality that Iraq was an unmitigated folly of generational repercussions, she downplayed but defended her abiding hawkishness. Hers was a strategic and political miscalculation born of neoconservative arrogance and a thoroughgoing misapprehension of the electorate. Mrs. Clinton had had five years to correct course, and she failed to do so. She then had another four years, and what did--do--we get? An assessment from militarily skeptical Obama's deputy national security adviser that she has "a comfort with U.S. military action."
She learned nothing. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 is the Hillary Clinton of 2008.
Let's be clear. If you're an Obama supporter who nonetheless favors what is euphemistically known in neocon circles as an "aggressive" foreign policy, then there is absolutely nothing awkward or intellectually untoward about a supportive shift to Clinton. You are in harmony with your convictions; you are, in fact, of the primordial, 1970s neoconservative mind--that which embraced a domestic liberalism tempered by foreign-policy muscularism.
If, however, you shifted six years ago, chiefly because of their foreign-policy dispute, from Clinton's Inevitability to Obama-as-Saner-Alternative, then to swing back now to Clinton is awkward and at least a trifle untoward indeed. For Obama and Clinton are of two fundamentally irreconcilable camps.