Meghan O’Rourke (who, full dis­clo­sure, edited the piece I wrote for Slate last winter) writes this today about Hillary Clinton’s unwill­ing­ness to “trust…the mes­sage of rev­o­lu­tion embod­ied in her candidacy”:

But the para­dox is that in taking the safe tack she thought made her more elec­table, she actu­ally made her­self less electable.

It’s a good gen­eral point, vari­a­tions on which I expect we’ll hear more and more as the HRC post­mortems roll in over the coming weeks. Here’s my ver­sion, which has to do with her Iraq war vote:

I’ve been amazed during this pri­mary cam­paign at how little dis­cus­sion has dealt with the fact–no, that’s too strong, let’s call it a hypoth­e­sis–that Clinton’s deci­sion to vote in favor of autho­riz­ing the Iraq war was made with one eye on her upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial run.

As a friend of mine who was work­ing in the Senate at the time told me, Clin­ton strongly believed that a vote in favor of the war was nec­es­sary–espe­cially given her gender–if she were going to prove her national-​security cre­den­tials in a pres­i­den­tial race. This was not a con­tro­ver­sial belief, and accord­ing to my friend, it accounts for the reason why those sen­a­tors who voted against the war autho­riza­tion never gave Clin­ton a hard time in public for her vote.

The only real dis­cus­sion of this dynamic that I’ve been able to find came in “Hillary’s War,” an excerpt from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta’s book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambi­tions of Hillary Rodham Clin­ton that was pub­lished in the New York Times exactly a year ago yes­ter­day. Gerth and Van Natta write:

Pol­i­tics too played a role in [Clinton's] delib­er­a­tions [about the Iraq war vote], as they did with many of her col­leagues. Since the morn­ing of Sept. 11, 2001, Hillary Clin­ton had labored to estab­lish her national-​security credentials…. Clin­ton knew she could never advance her career–or win the pres­i­dency, espe­cially–if she didn’t prove that she was tough enough to be com­man­der in chief. Female can­di­dates, it’s pre­sumed, have often suf­fered as a result of the stereo­type that they could never be as strong as men. Now the defense of the home­land had become such a para­mount issue that Amer­i­cans insisted their pres­i­dent–man or woman–pro­tect them from another ter­ror­ist attack….

Of course, Clin­ton was tough. And she was expe­ri­enced. But accord­ing to aides and strate­gists, her inse­cu­rity about her public image and her nascent national-​security cre­den­tials made it dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, for her to vote no.

The great irony, of course, is that Clinton’s sup­port of the Iraq war res­o­lu­tion–which was sup­posed to be, in O’Rourke’s term, the “safe tack” toward elec­tabil­ity–turned out to be one of the very few real policy dif­fer­ences in the Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary. But more than that, Clinton’s unwill­ing­ness to con­cede that her Iraq war vote was wrong (as John Edwards did) gave Barack Obama’s cam­paign a per­sua­sive raison d’etre, espe­cially in its early stages, as well as an impor­tant argu­ment against Clinton’s insis­tence on the impor­tance of experience.