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Ganging Up On Hillary Too Easy

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By GAIL COLLINS

Published: November 2, 2007

Hillary Clinton stood on a stage for two hours Tuesday night, being yelled at by six men. Now this is what they mean by pressure.

The most important job in the world is at stake and every single one of the other candidates walked into the presidential debate gunning for her. They began piling on from the first question. She took it all and came out in one piece. She's one tough woman. Kudos.

Her fighting spirit was all the more impressive because so many of the positions she was defending were virtually indefensible. It's not easy to try to make a matter of principle out of a refusal to say anything specific about Social Security. And you really need a spine of steel to stand up on national television and explain why it was a good idea to vote for a bellicose Senate resolution on Iran that has given George W. Bush a chance to start making ominous remarks about weapons of mass destruction again.

"Well, first of all, I am against a rush to war," she said. That would have been disturbing even if she had not attacked "rushing to war" twice more in the next minute. Being against a rush to another war in the Middle East seems to set the bar a tad low. How does she feel about a measured march to war? A leisurely stroll?

And how could she have voted for an Iran resolution that was sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who was basically drummed out of his party in Connecticut because of his hyper-hawk stance on Iraq? Lieberman, who was once a somewhat boring but apparently good-hearted centrist, has turned into a disaster area for Democrats, a one-man quagmire.

If it hadn't been for his unhelpful performance in Florida after the 2000 election, perhaps Al Gore would be president now and there would be peace and global cooling throughout the planet. Honestly, there's a book in this somewhere: Joe Lieberman Ruined Everything.

We digress.
Hillary Clinton is relying on her Democratic audience to understand that all her peculiar positions and triple-waffles have to do with a fear of being demagogued by the Republicans in the general election. But you would have to be a very, very committed Hillaryite to be comfortable listening to two solid hours of dodging and weaving on everything from her vote on the Iran resolution to her husband's attempt to keep records of their White House communications secret until after 2012. ("... Certainly we'll move as quickly as our circumstances and the processes of the National Archives permits.")

Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times.

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