Hil can't skip Iraq

    Returning to New Hampshire for the first time in more than a decade, Sen. Hillary Clinton met yesterday with enthusiastic overflow crowds - but also with pointed questions about her past and future stances on the Iraq war.

    Holding a town hall-style meeting with an audience of hundreds, Clinton emphasized her relationship with her still-popular husband and lambasted what she called the Bush administration's "incompetence" in handling the Iraq conflict.

    But Nashua resident Roger Tilton, 46, who asked Clinton to say voting for the war was a mistake, left unsatisfied.

    "She won't take responsibility," Tilton said afterward. "She won't admit that it was a mistake, and until she does that, Barack Obama and John Edwards have her on the war issue."

    War questions, among many others on college tuition, abortion and energy, surfaced again in the afternoon, when Clinton addressed a crowd of thousands in Concord.


Clinton has a bigger problem than any other potential democrat candidate if she starts claiming that she was "misled", given that her husband's administration made many similar, if not identical, claims about Saddam.

If she starts pushing the "Bush LIED" cannard, she risks her opponents dredging up clips of her husband and other officials in his administration, effectively contradicting her.

And if she tries to claim that her husband ended Saddam's threat then she can't claim that Bush misled her.

Its really her biggest problem at this point, not Edwards and not Obama.