Few political figures have reached out to the lefty netroots the way retired general and former presidential candidate Wes Clark has. So I’m a bit surprised by the way he makes his argument on Hillary’s vote for the war:

Matt Stoller: But specifically on the war, though she spent her whole life training for office, that was a terrible judgment call. Wes Clark: Yeah that was a bad decision and I’d like to think I wouldn’t have made that decision had I been in the United States Senate. A lot of people did. She said if she knows now how it would have been used she wouldn’t have done it. Yeah it was a mistake but I think it’s the kind of mistake you gotta let pass. You can’t call everything right, and I think she’s made so many right calls I think she’ll make the majority of the calls, she’s the best hope we’ve got for the kind of government we need in the future.

Judging by the polls, a strongly antiwar Democratic Party has made its peace with Hillary (no pun intended). So it’s not something she has to panic about. (Oddly enough, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or Mike Huckabee will be able to say, “my opponent voted for this war, I didn’t.”) But I don’t know how much that anti-war crowd will be mollified by the argument, ’she voted right on S-CHIP, so authorizing the war was her one big mistake.’ In their minds, I’m not sure voting right on other issues balances out.