Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites Patrick Ruffini: “Hillary Clinton is morphing into a George W. Bush Democrat.”

I am reminded of her comment to the New Republic earlier this year, on whether her husband’s use of miliary force, even without U.N. approval, had shaped her decision to vote in favor of the Iraq resolution:

But, she added, “there were those in the Congress who thought that the United States should never even threaten force–or certainly take force–in the absence of U.N. Security Council approval. Well, I had seen during the Clinton administration that sometimes, that’s not even possible. Sometimes, it’s not even possible for the president to get congressional approval to pursue vital national security interests.” This does not sound like someone who, in her heart, had at the time thought George Bush’s confrontation was a terrible mistake.

And the closing lines:

Ultimately, perhaps the strangest thing about Hillary Clinton’s war vote is that she actually seems to have related to George W. Bush’s predicament. She remembered the feeling of being in the White House, looking at a dangerous and unstable world, and imagining that the United States had the power to make it safer and more humane. She knew the feeling of having a powerful military on call. She not only believed that Saddam had WMD, but also that, by deposing him, the United States could promote freedom and democracy.
Those beliefs made Clinton receptive to Bush’s arguments for war, even if it was almost certainly not one she would have initiated. But the final straw for her decision may have had less to do with a vision of U.S. power than with a vision of herself. She had seen her husband in Bush’s shoes, confronting a Congress that didn’t trust his foreign policy leadership. And she knew that, someday, she might find herself in those same shoes as well. In that sense, for Hillary Clinton, supporting the Iraq war may have been as much about her future as it was about her past.