A general who briefed Hillary, though he's not one of her advisers, said roughly the same thing about her:

If Senator Clinton can best Senator Obama in today's round of primaries and caucuses and go on to capture the White House, a co-author of the surge strategy in Iraq says he is convinced she would hold off on authorizing a large-scale immediate withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq.

In a weekend interview, a retired four-star general, Jack Keane, said that when he briefed Mrs. Clinton in late 2006 and January 2007 on the counteroffensive strategy known as the surge, she "generally supported the surge strategy in the sense she wanted it to succeed but she was skeptical about its chances.

Mr. Keane is in a position to know Mrs. Clinton, having worked informally with her since 2001, when he was vice chief of staff for the Army. Early last year, the Clinton team even asked the retired general to become a formal adviser to the campaign on military issues, a request Mr. Keane declined, as he has done when asked by other candidates.

"Senator Clinton is very knowledgeable about national security and is probably going to be strong on defense," he said. "I have no doubts whatsoever that if she were president in January '09 she would not act irresponsibly and issue orders to conduct an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the consequences, and squander the gains that have been made." Mr. Keane added that he could not imagine any president in the White House making that kind of decision.

http://www.nysun.com/article/72209?page_no=1

Personally I'm somewhat encouraged to hear that Obama doesn't really plan to stick to a strict timetable for withdrawal. That wouldn't be a good idea.

Whatever. Did I tell you about this great speech I made in 2002? My judgment rocks!

There's no contradiction between what she says here and anything Obama's saying in the campaign.

The fact that Hillary Clinton is attempting to say there's a contradiction is evidence of the dishonesty she's using in the campaign. Clinton is making charges that she *knows* are based on how things will come across to non-savvy voters -- who don't have time to dig in and get the full quotes and context of things.

Seeing Power speak, I have more respect for her. She is responding to interview questions the way an intelligent person talks to another intelligent person. Too bad it's so hard to get away with that in politics.

Yeah, if Obama's sole position on Iraq was that silly line he repeats in debates ad nauseam - "we will get out as carefully as we were careless going in" - then there'd be no contradiction. But he has a specific plan, and Power says:

he will of course not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate.

Now, if he doesn't plan to rely on the plan he's publicly hawking, what's the point of the plan? Does that make any sense, having a plan that you don't actually plan on implementing or "relying upon"? This is like if Hillary's health adviser came out and said, "of course, due to the opposition her plan would face in Congress and all the minutiae we haven't considered yet, we don't actually plan on using or even relying on the healthcare plan she's currently proposing, though we do have some vague commitment to make healthcare more affordable. The plan she's pushing is just a best-case scenario." No contradiction?

... will only "prove damaging" to Senator Obama's campaign if media commentators and SNL continue to insist that they function as adjuncts to Senator Clinton's communications (propoganda?) team.

How long will it be before Salon ends the pretense and just redirects directly to hillaryis44.org?

"All told, Power's comments are not unreasonable -- or all that surprising. She says, basically, that the situation in Iraq may change between now and when the next president is inaugurated, and that Obama's withdrawal plan is only a best case scenario. Maybe I'm just overly cynical, but I've always suspected that once any of the candidates was in office, their actual actions on Iraq might not reflect their campaign promises. (A retired general responsible for co-authoring the "surge" plan for Iraq, who's previously advised Hillary Clinton, recently made similar comments about Clinton's stance.) "

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Since no one can anticipate what Iraq will be like in a year, things could be remarkably improved or drastically worse, I think it's very responsible of BOTH candidates to say what they want to do now and then base the withdrawal plans on the conditions when they take office. Your quote of "maybe I'm just overly cynical" is right on the money.

You can't be so hammers down on these two people who are actually trying to find ways to end this clusterf*ck that George Bush & Dick Cheney got us in to.

which is why it's such a shame that she's no longer advising the Obama campaign. I wouldn't care if she threw herself at the mercy of the Clinton campaign and got hired there, just so she's on somebody's team and becomes the next Secretary of State.

What she says is so obvious that it defies further deconstruction. It's what many of us--Obama and Hillary supporters alike--said when word came out that a military advisor to Clinton suggested the same thing (that Clinton would not be able to stick to her "campaign plan.")

Surely we have not gone so far down the cheer-for-our-own-team-only road that we don't see the wisdom of this woman's words. David Brooks wrote several weeks ago that the undoing of the Democratic Party, even if they win, will be the disconnect between what they promised in Iraq (or, perhaps more accurately, what people believe they promised) and what either candidate will possibly be able to deliver. I've complained before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record: Gotcha questioners in debates have forced these candidates into straitjacketed positions on policy that they will now have to try to live up to. This kind of post facto (is that the right Latin expression?) policy making is crazy. (Whatever I get cornered into promising in the debate will now have to become U.S. policy.")

It's unconscionable that either candidate should use this kind of thing against the other--on the war or NAFTA--as both of them have essentially the same position on those issues and both want NOT to be tied to their fuzzier "campaign positions." All this does is further curtail their natural speech in public and debate forums and bring us (back) to the age of completely scripted candidates.

It would be nice if both candidates could say what Power herself said, that it would be silly to be tied to a position crafted during a campaign before all of the information is in the candidate's hands, but it's awfully hard to maintain that level of nuance when you are being pointed and shouted at by Tim Russert, who's demanding a precise hour of troop deployment and a blood-oath. When anyone tries to remain vague for the purpose of preserving complexity, s/he is inevitably hammered the next day, as happened in several debates when some of them refused to play the moderator's game.