I can see I haven’t convinced Kevin Drum. But I’m not sure I’m going to try any harder to “prove” that her foreign policy will be mad. Maybe it will be good. There’s a lot of uncertainty. If there were some other clear reason to prefer Hillary Clinton, maybe I’d back her despite my doubts. But I don’t think there is. In domestic policy and electability terms, I think all three have some strengths and some weakness. On foreign policy, every indication available to me that there’s any difference between her and Edwards or Obama suggests that it’ll be a difference that doesn’t reflect well on her.

How sure am I that she’d be worse? Not incredibly sure. But to me the great difficulty of this race is that Clinton’s established such a strong presumption that she’ll be the nominee that it gets difficult to argue against her without making the case that she’s somehow horrible. Either she’s the devil, or else she should be president. But that’s silly.

When I see a race between two politicians, one of whom got Iraq wrong and one of whom got it right, to me that establishes a presumption in favor of the candidate who got it right, no matter whose husband the wrong one is. When it turns out that the one who got it wrong also has a group of advisors heavily weighted toward the group of pro-war “experts” who helped push so many Democratic politicians into taking her wrong position on the war in 2002, that re-enforces my presumption. When the one who got it right is closer to a circle of people who were cast out of favor due to their opposition to the war or willingness to associate with Very Shrill Howard Dean, that re-enforces my presumption. Stuff like the Kyl-Lieberman vote, the funny business on nuclear weapons, the “naive and irresponsible” bit all further re-enforces my presumption.

And I think once you look at it that way, the whole race looks different. There’s been a ton of commentary about how Barack Obama hasn’t said or done anything to debunk people’s presumption that Hillary Clinton should be the nominee. And that appears to be true. But what if you don’t start with that presumption? And I don’t think we should. To me, the presumption that a candidate who can say he has a record of sound foreign policy judgment that can be contrasted with Republican X’s record of support for Bush administration fiascos makes a lot more sense than the presumption that Clinton should get the nomination.

I think Kevin Drum’s focus on foreign policy “instincts” in raising a question like “Iraq aside, do you think Gore has fundamentally changed his worldview since the 90s in ways that Hillary hasn’t?” is a mistake. It’s worth considering principles. Iraq was premised on two big ideas. One was that unilateral preventive military force is a good way to handle non-proliferation policy. The second was that unilateral preventive military force was a good way to advance democracy. People who opposed the war, like Gore, believed that neither of those things were true. People who supported the war believed that one or both of those things was true.

I, for example, never really thought that invading random medium-sized dictatorships to try to turn them into democracies made sense. I did, however, believe that the use of unilateral military force as a tool of non-proliferation policy was a good idea. In retrospect, I, like John Edwards, no longer believe that. Does Hillary Clinton still believe it?

But to look at it from the “instincts” point of view, I’m not sure how much we can really conclude from looking at the Clinton years. I think the policies Bill Clinton enacted while in office were pretty good. At the same time, it’s clear that the Clinton administration perceived itself, rightly or wrongly, to be making foreign policy under circumstances of tight political constraints. And, in particular, they believed that the tight political constraints made it unwise or impossible to pursue really big policy initiatives. That makes it hard to say exactly where anyone’s instincts lay. It’s clear that some members of Bill Clinton’s administration left office feeling it was too bad that the political circumstances didn’t exist that would make it possible to launch a preventive war in Iraq (Kenneth Pollack says as much in The Threatening Storm). It’s also clear that some members left office feeling it was too bad that the political circumstances didn’t exist that would make it possible to ratify the Kyoto Protocols (Al Gore, obviously). And some people probably thought both of those things.

And so on and so forth down the line. I don’t find anything in the Clinton administration record terribly frightening. But it wasn’t perfect either. There’s raw material in there for a great foreign policy and also material in there for a terrible one. To me, the most troubling thing about Hillary Clinton is that her read of the politics is to always err on the side of hawkishness. And of course if she (a) votes for Iraq, (b) watches Iraq turn into an unpopular disaster, (c) declines to apologize for her actions, (d) wins the Democratic nomination, and (e) wins the presidency then that’s only going to re-enforce that interpretation of politics. After all, if unapologetic support for a hugely unpopular foreign policy disaster doesn’t even doom you in a Democratic Party primary, then why shouldn’t you always err on the side of hawkishness?