Much Ado About "I'm Sorry"

Much ado has been made about Hillary's so-called "mistake" in recent days, as the question of whether the frontrunner will apologize for her vote for the war — she won't — has been much discussed in the press and on the trail. Her refusal to apologize has been reported as a careful strategic decision, attacked as an expression of stubbornness and arrogance, and widely regarded as a key test of the campaign.

John Edwards apologizes for his vote all the time.

Barack Obama was against the war then and in no position to vote.

The question being asked about Hillary is not (even if it should be) where is she now, but where was she then, and why. For those looking for a mea culpa, and there are some, none is forthcoming. A strategic judgment? An expression of arrogance? Or could it just be the truth?

It's not that hard to convince a politician to apologize when they know they were wrong. That's largely a matter of timing and tactics; in politics, apologies are an art form.

It's convincing a politician to apologize when they think they were right that's a major, often insurmountable, problem. One of my jobs in 1988 was trying to convince Michael Dukakis to apologize for Willie Horton being let out on furlough. Problem was, he didn't think the program was wrong. Convincing someone to apologize for a mistake they didn't make, especially if that someone is a lawyer, is no easy task.

Ask Hillary whether she was misinformed before her vote to authorize the war, and it's an easy yes.

Ask her whether there would have even been a vote had we had adequate intelligence, and she'll say of course not, and of course she wouldn't have voted for presidential authority in those circumstances, no one would.

Ask her whether the war's been conducted well, and you'll get an earful. She didn't authorize this.

But ask her whether she was wrong to vote as she did, given the information she had, and I think I know the answer.

She didn't make a mistake. She was misled, not mistaken.

The "right" vote was to give the president the authority he asked for, given what we knew at the time.

She has to believe this, or it would make no sense not to be apologizing.

The argument that a woman can never afford to be wrong about foreign policy would certainly not seem to apply here, where the greater danger is losing within your own party because of your insistence that you were right. It would be the easiest thing in the world to deal with a mistake by calling it that, unless you're convinced you did nothing wrong.

Any good criminal defense lawyer will tell you, only half in jest, that the worst clients are the innocent ones. The guilty ones will do anything you tell them. The innocent ones are the ones who won't listen. You think you don't need to listen if you did nothing wrong. You think you know the answers. Sometimes, you think wrong.

You could argue, certainly with hindsight, that when you vote for a war that turns out to be a disaster, leaving our troops trying to maintain order in someone else's civil war, you are by definition mistaken, no matter whom you relied on for your information. If information was the problem, you should have known better or insisted on more. If haste was the issue, you should have waited. Whatever you did, you did wrong.

Of course, that's not how legal responsibility actually works. You look at intent, at the facts as they appeared to be from the perspective of the one being judged, to determine whether a person is blameworthy. It's not a matter of what turned out to be the case, but of what they thought they were doing at the time they did it that is generally decisive of blame.

The problem with Hillary's stance on her vote is that the country needs a leader not a lawyer. It is not only that her defense is too technical, but also that it is too small. She may be right about the intelligence provided to Senators, and right about the role the Senate should play in authorizing the president to use force, but the question here is not whether she was a good Senator — she got re-elected to that job quite nicely — but who should be president.

Hillary has yet to really shape her story of the war and what went wrong. Whatever that story is, it has to take place at a level larger than the definition of bad intent in voting. Hillary's story of this war needs to be about how we were mistaken, most of us, and won't be again, on how she understands the past as a prelude to the future she would build.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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