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.