Hillary Clinton risked being outflanked in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination this week when she softened her position on the Iraq war but failed to go far enough to satisfy anti-war critics.
Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 and has so far refused to renounce that, took to television and radio studios for a media blitz on Wednesday morning to set out a revised position, after a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan last week.
She said she opposed George W Bush’s 21 500 troop increase for Iraq proposed last week and advocated instead sending more troops to Afghanistan. She wanted the US troop level to be capped at 132 000, the number on January 1, followed by a phased withdrawal.
But she remains out of step with the other main potential candidates, Barack Obama, senator Joe Biden and John Edwards, who are firmly opposed to the war.
Although she is one of the frontrunners and has already accumulated sizeable campaign funds and an experienced election team, she is in danger of miscalculating the speed with which the public mood is shifting against the war and the strength of anti-war feeling in the Democratic Party.
Obama, who, on Tuesday, formed an exploratory committee, the first formal move in seeking the party’s nomination for presidential candidate, is strongly opposed to the war. He was not a member of the Senate when the vote took place. Edwards was, but, unlike Clinton, he has since renounced it.
As part of a glacial shift in her position, Clinton this week criticised Bush’s proposed increase. “He’s taking troops away from Afghanistan, where I think we need to be putting more troops, and sending them to Iraq on a mission that I think has a very limited, if any, chance for success,” she said.
She suggested withholding funding from the Iraqi government — but crucially, not the Pentagon — unless it begins to tackle sectarian violence.
She said: “I don’t think we should continue to fund the protection for the Iraqi government leaders, or for the training and equipping of their army, unless they meet certain conditions, including making the political compromises that have been called for now for more than two years.”
Clinton is in danger of suffering the fate of previous Democratic contenders such as Edmund Muskie, the clear favourite for the Democratic nomination in 1972, who lost out in the anti-Vietnam war fervour to George McGovern.
She was scheduled to hold a joint press conference with two other Congressional representatives on the Iraq trip with her, John McHugh and Evan Bayh. The press conference was planned for Tuesday but, within 10 minutes of Obama announcing he was setting up an exploratory committee for the presidential race, it was postponed. Clinton’s team said it was postponed to allow McHugh, who had stopped in Germany suffering from dehydration, time to return to Washington.
She is expected to formally make her decision about joining the race for the nomination within the next few weeks.
Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives are working on the wording of a resolution to be put to a vote next week condemning Bush’s proposed increase.
A Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, who last week described the troop increase as the biggest US foreign policy blunder since Vietnam, is cooperating with the Democrats.
Democrats, including Clinton, are united in support of the resolution but divided on whether to move beyond that to block funding for the increase.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in the last election, said the resolution was likely to be “very straightforward and simple: a single sentence or so about disapproval”.
Clinton this week refused to back the funding tactic, which the strongest anti-war senators, such as Edward Kennedy, are supporting. “The problem, of course, is that the president has enormous authority under our constitutional system to do exactly what he’s doing. He does have the money already appropriated in the budget,” she said.
The arrival of Obama means Mrs Clinton, who has enjoyed frontrunner status for months, will face serious competition for funding from Democratic donors. “He’s going to have an effect on our fundraising, no question about it,” Sim Farar, a Clinton fundraiser in Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times.
Obama’s campaign team estimates he will need to raise about $70-million to fight the primaries next January. — Â