From the “Now She Tells Us” Department, Hillary Clinton has disowned her vote to authorize force in Iraq. She wants a do-over, a mulligan as they say in golf. She wants us to forget that she and most of the Democratic party were so knock kneed with fright over the possibility that they would be branded “cowards” or “traitors” by Republicans in the 2002 mid terms, that they swallowed their well documented pacifism in the face of the killers and thugs of the world just to secure their own political hides:

As Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to assess a possible presidential candidacy and the contours of a Democratic nomination fight, she has taken another step away from her 2002 vote authorizing President Bush to attack Iraq by saying that she “wouldn’t have voted that way” if she knew everything she knows now.

Clinton has often been asked if she regrets her vote authorizing military action and she usually answers that question with an artful dodge, saying that she accepts responsibility for the vote and suggesting that if the Senate had all the information it has today (no WMD, troubled post-war military planning, etc. . .), there would never have been a vote on the Senate floor.

However, she has never gone as far as some of her potential rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination—who also voted for the war—and called her vote a mistake or declared that she would have cast her vote differently with all the facts presently available to her—until now.

Talk about a woman with her finger in the air sampling the political winds…

Of course, she learned at the feet of the master of tacking with the political gales. Bill Clinton never met an issue he couldn’t straddle until he was sure that he came down on the right side of it with the public. And Hillary is proving equally adept at the practice – a sure sign that a Hillary campaign would be geared to the general election from the start.

This is a high risk strategy considering who usually votes in Democratic primaries and caucuses. One need only look at reaction to this latest calculated move on her part from the self-styled guardians of ideological purity and party disciplinarians on the left; the netnuts and their campaign to rid the Democratic party of evils such as centrism and strong national security proponents:

Honestly, you have to wonder how many focus groups and strategy sessions with her massive team of highly paid advisors that Clinton had to sit through before coming up with those carefully chosen and fairly meaningless eight words, “and I certainly wouldn’t have voted that way.”

And on top of that, you have to wonder what all those highly paid consultants were smoking. Is there one voter’s mind who will be changed by this? Right-wingers, who wouldn’t have voted for her anyway, will attack her for lacking the conviction to stand by her 2002 vote. Left-wingers, who wouldn’t have voted for her anyway, will ask what we’re asking now, which basically is, WTF? Maybe centrists will praise her at their 2008 convention, in a booth at Charlie Palmer’s up on Capitol Hill.

That said, it’s not too still not too late for Hillary Clinton to win over at least some anti-war Democrats. And it’s not that hard, either. Just admit in no uncertain terms that you made a mistake in 2002, and why—and then fight like hell on the Senate floor to get us out of that mess over there, ASAP.

Should she wear sackcloth and sprinkle ashes on the Senate floor when she performs this grand mea culpa, groveling before the Attywood’s of the left? Or, should she seek to become part of the solution in Iraq? Getting us out of “that mess” may be an emotionally satisfying solution to the immature and intellectually shallow netnuts. But even John Kerry recognizes that not leaving until something approaching a viable Iraqi state is in the offing marks Attywood and the rest of the mindless, knee jerk, anti-Bush crowd as dangerous loons.

Hillary is not backtracking for them. What Mrs. Clinton is trying to do is build a brand new Democratic coalition, one that will carry her to victory in both the primaries and the general election. She is counting on enormous numbers of new women voters to offset the anger of the far left netnuts. And she’s also counting on disgruntled moderate GOP’ers in the northeast and midwest who may not particularly like her but can appreciate her fairly hard headed approach to national security to swallow hard, cross party lines, and vote for her.

As I said, a high risk strategy but one that holds great rewards if she can manage it. The problem as I see it is that Jesse Jackson tried something similar in the 1988 primaries and failed.

Jackson won 11 primaries that year – including his surprising win in Michigan which temporarily made him something of a front runner for the nomination. Jackson tried to cobble together parts of the old Democratic coalition – big labor and blacks – with the far left and other minorities. It proved too big of a task and he ultimately went down to defeat, losing most of the remaining primaries to Michael Dukakis.

The lesson for Hillary is that the women’s vote alone will not bring her the top prize. Somehow (and Dick Morris has said this as well) she will have to at least mitigate the hatred of the netnuts – pull their teeth – in order to win. She will probably not be able to do this with any grand gestures about Iraq. But she may assuage some of their anger if she begins advocating other issues near and dear to the hearts of the left including national health care and workers’ rights. It won’t satisfy the on-line crowd but it may help with the rest of organized left; not to gain their votes but to prevent their opposition from derailing her candidacy.

It’s a fine line and I don’t believe she can walk it. And even if she does, she will have left herself open to the charge in the general election of being “too liberal” as every Democratic candidate who has run for President in the last 30 years has done.

A Hillary candidacy will be fun to watch. It will electrify women all over the country and, given the novelty of her husband campaigning for her, will constitute one of the greatest shows in the history of our colorful and entertaining political life. But if she doesn’t fail in the primaries, she will almost certainly stumble in the general election. That is, unless the Republicans commit political suicide and nominate someone like Newt Gingrich who may be the only Republican candidate whose negatives match Hillary’s own. But I don’t expect Newt or any other far right candidate to win.

It will be a McCain-Hillary battle. Maybe. Perhaps. Well…don’t take it to the bank. But you might want to slip a fiver to a Vegas bookie on the off chance that I’m right.