Dan K,

Thanks for the extended reply. Please see my responses to some of your remarks below:

The fact that the Republicans in general, or Bush in particular, have a much worse approach to health care than any of the Democrats is irrelevant to the Democratic debate. Similarly, the fact that Clinton's foreign policy errors in the Senate are not as bad as Bush's many crimes and mistakes is irrelevant to the Democratic debate.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "irrelevant". I know that I would be much harder on Sen. Obama's refusal to embrace the principle of universality if the rest of his health care policy did not represent a vast improvement on the status quo that the Republicans are mostly interested in defending (when they are not trying to make it worse). Similarly, I would be much harder on Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote if she had been leading the drive for war back in 2002, rather than responding to an agenda framed by a Republican president. What I think is true, is that the fact of a far greater policy distance between any Democrat and any Republican doesn't make intra-Democratic policy debates irrelevant or trivial. On the contrary, they are of course precisely what the primaries should be about.

The notion that Clinton just wanted to give Bush a big threatening stick, and didn't expect he would actually use it, doesn't wash.

You might be right. I honestly don't know what Sen. Clinton thought Bush was likely to do with the authority. I'm pretty certain, based on her contemporaneous public remarks, that she knew, as all who were paying attention did, that there was a war party in the administration, that had wanted war with Iraq long before 9/11, and that wanted it still, come hell or high water, and that there was, at a minimum, a serious danger that Bush would side with that party. Becausse of this, I think she can fairly be faulted for not anticipating that Bush would abuse the authority given him -- as well as for not protesting, sooner and in stronger terms, when he did just that.

Be that as it may, my point was merely that the grant of authority was both useful (it helped get the inspectors in) and also horribly abused (that it gave Bush the opportunity to launch an unnecessary war). I can easily imagine a different president using that same authority wisely, rather than abusing it horribly. That doesn't make it a good risk to have taken, or to take in the future. Had I been in Sen. Clinton's place, I hope I would have had the presence of mind and the courage to have voted no, as I wish she had done. And I freely acknowledge that everyone who voted for that resolution bears some share of responsibility for the war -- though vastly less, in my view, than the President who asked for the resolution, started the war unnecessarily, and then bungled what he started.

It is also weak to suggest that the war would not have been a mistake if it had been executed by a competent manager such as Clinton, rather than bungling idiots such as Bush.

Agreed. I didn't mean to suggest such a thing. What I do think is plausible, however, is that the initial mistake of starting the war would not have been compounded by so many others, of such magnitude, if a less self-deluded administration had been in power.

[I]t is a plausible conjecture that the war has had harmful side effects throughout the region, including in Pakistan, and Axelrod raised that conjecture, and a reminder of Hillary Clinton's role in enabling this war, in a completely responsible way.

I agree that that conjecture is plausible--indeed, as a general proposition, it is highly probable. The next part, however, is where you lose me.

Axelrod was not merely raising a general conjecture about the harmful regional side-effects of the war, while also reminding people about Sen. Clinton's Iraq vote. He meant of course to suggest that those two things are tightly coupled as cause and effect, but that is far less than the half of it.

The key element of his remarks--and the one that has caused all the fuss--is the one your account leaves out. For Axelrod also pretty clearly meant to link the vote for the Iraq resolution, though the medium of the war's harmful regional side effects, to the murder of Bhutto--the domestic political impact of which, after all, was the topic about which he was being asked.

Either he was claiming some causal link between Sen. Clinton's vote and Bhutto's murder, or his remarks make no sense in context, as a reply to the questions he was being asked. I think the intended subtext was reasonably clear: Won't Bhutto's assassination cause voters to look with favor on Clinton's claim of greater foreign policy experience? Why no, it will cause them to doubt her all the more, since she helped bring this about with her ill-advised vote for war in Iraq.

That causal chain, if we try to trace it back from Bhutto's murder to Clinton's vote, is simply too long, with too many links in it that owe little or nothing to the vote on the Iraq resolution, and with too many other chains of events leading off in completely different directions, to make this claim even remotely plausible.

It may be that Axelrod does not beleive it himself. It may be that he was just doing the standard campaign flak's job of trying to deflect unwelcome questions by returning them to the comfortable terrain of a tried-and-true campaign message and that, in this process, he found himself asserting more than he would if he were looking at the matter sine ira et studio. In fact, I'm inclined to think that this is exactly what happened; it is easy to imagine oneself making such a blunder under such circumstances, and then digging oneself further in the hole in the aftermath.

All I was trying to show, in my partial defense of Larry Johnson's post, is that those who have reacted negatively to Axelrod's remarks were not reacting to nothing. Taken at face value they are both bizarre and, especially given the occasion, highly inappropriate. I'm inclined to cut him some slack, but I can easily see why others might not be so inclined.