The Reason Hillary Clinton Lost

As journalists prepare the inevitable obituaries for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid, I hope we will remember what is -- at least for many of us -- the single most important reason that Hillary Clinton is losing the presidential nomination: her stubborn refusal to admit she made a mistake in voting for the war in Iraq. As she said in February, 2007:

If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.

I have been fruitlessly hunting for a video Clinton's remarks, but today a reader (Carthage, here and The Field) tracked one down and got it to me. It's an ordinary CNN report, but watching it I'm still dumbfounded.

I still remember when I first heard those words, and I still believe they doomed her candidacy. As kos put it at the time:

The closer we get to the primaries, the more Hillary will realize that she can't escape her Iraq dilemma. I don't want her to apologize. I want her to say, "I made a mistake." Edwards did it. Just about every other Democrat who idiotically trusted this president and supported the war has done it. Had Hillary done this last year, the issue would be moot.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton says that knowing what she knows now, she would not have voted for the war. She gets no great credit for that concession, however. Anyone with a pulse would vote against the war if given a do-over with the benefit of hindsight.

But in life you don't get do-overs, and she did have enough information at the time to have made a different decision. She did make an error in judgment -- an avoidable one, and by refusing to admit that fact, she offered us no indication that she would avoid the very same error in the future.

Hillary Clinton will not have completely lost until she exits the race, whether it's in the next few weeks or it's in August. And as long as she stays in, the campaign continues, for better or for worse.

But there's no doubt that she will lose, and that moment from February 17, 2007 in Dover, New Hampshire is the single most important reason why.