Letters to the Editor
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Clinton at the threshold
I am a 57 year old woman with many friends supporting both Democratic candidates this season. I do not consider any of them "Clintonistas" or "Obamatrons" but rather good, intelligent people who think deeply about the key questions confronting our nation today.
All of us recognized at the time that a vote authorizing Bush's war on Iraq was unjustified and immoral. Senator Clinton would have had ample information to understand the same thing had she read the NIE reports or even just the daily newspapers from around the globe. The fact that she cravenly chose to vote for Bush and the war is the signal evidence of her flawed political and moral judgement.
This was not an accidental vote, but rather an actively considered choice. That is why Senator Clinton has not admitted her mistake in voting to authorize the war. She did not make a "mistake" in terms of her political calculation. To try to blame her wrongheaded choices on male advisers in her coterie is unworthy and anti-feminist indeed.
Senator Clinton has taken the expedient rather than the right path on numerous ocassions, with the Iraq war vote being only the most obvious one. Her decision to use underhanded campaign smear tactics; her attempt to reverse the DNC rules in Michigan and Florida to her profit; her calculated injection of race into the South Carolina campaign and of baseless fear in the Ohio and Texas contests; her exaggeration of her own policy contributions as First Lady; her outrageous contention that only she and McCain have crossed the Commander in Chief threshold, her inability or refusal to engage on a high intellectual plane with the central moral issue of our era, race -- all of these failures of leadership weigh heavily against her in my view.
So I am old, I am a woman and I am supporting Barack Obama.