Iraq War vote underscores Hillary’s greatest weakness

If you had to pick a single position that allowed Barack Obama to pull ahead in the 2008 Democratic primaries, his opposition to the war would almost certainly be it.

It still looms large in the liberal mind: Obama frequently uses the Iraq War as proof of his foreign policy wisdom, which is otherwise unearned by evidence or argument.

For instance, humiliated of late by the rise of the Islamic State — a group he’d glibly dismissed as a negligible “jayvee team” — Obama now concedes it’s a real problem but blames its rise entirely on the war.

“Two things: One is, ISIL is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaida in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama told VICE News last month. “Which is an example of an unintended consequence. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.”

Obama is merely the headmaster of this cheap and lazy school of thought. Blaming the Iraq War for the world’s problems or using it as a way to deflect legitimate criticism of Obama’s foreign policy remains the primary rhetorical gimmick for many liberals.

Much has been written about Jeb Bush’s challenge. Unfair as it might be, Bush must run as, well, a Bush. His last name is a burden for several reasons, but chief of among them is the unpopularity of the Iraq War.

In a debate with Clinton, whatever barbs Bush might hurl at the Obama-Clinton foreign policy record — and there is no shortage of pointed ones to be thrown — Clinton would probably be able to deflect them by dredging up “your brother’s war” (even though she might wisely avoid familial guilt-by-association arguments, given her own baggage in this regard).

The weird thing is, Clinton has far more responsibility for the Iraq War than Jeb Bush does. Meanwhile, none of the potential GOP presidential hopefuls voted for the war in 2002. Scott Walker was the Milwaukee County executive; Marco Rubio was in the Florida House of Representatives; Chris Christie was a U.S. district attorney; Ted Cruz was a policy wonk at the Federal Trade Commission; Rand Paul and Ben Carson were practicing surgeons. And so on.

Of course, one could argue that many would have voted for the war (probably true of Rubio, probably untrue of Paul). But that’s all hypothetical. Not so with Clinton. She voted for it, defended it in the well of the Senate, and arguably lost the primaries in 2008 because she refused to apologize for her vote.

But Clinton’s support for the war underscores a broader vulnerability. From the endless scandals of her husband’s administration to the brawls over the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton has been a partisan fixture of Washington at its most ugly moments.