The Washington Post blog reports that Hillary Clinton is trying to rework her image, glossing over her support of the war and presenting herself as a Midwesterner rather than a New York liberal:
On the campaign trail, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has stepped up her anti-Iraq war rhetoric. In stops in northwest Iowa on Friday and Saturday, she consistently raised a series of points: She has for two years pushed President Bush to change his Iraq policy, supports a proposal sponsored by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to deauthorize the war and voted against an emergency supplemental spending bill on Thursday to register her opposition to President Bush's war policy.
"I think it's important for someone like me who has been a strong supporter of the military and has worked hard to try to get our troops everything they need to start saying the best thing we can do is to get them out of the middle of this sectarian civil war in Iraq," Clinton said. Asked in Sioux Center about the first thing she would do as president, Clinton said, "if President Bush, hasn't ended the war in Iraq, I will. That is the first thing I'm going to do."
Clinton's remarks on the campaign trail, of course, leave out a few elements of her record on the war. She voted for the original 2002 authorization. She often opposed efforts in the Senate during 2005 and 2006 to set the kind of timelines for ending the war that she now backs, particularly bills by her fellow Democrats Russ Feingold (Wisc.) and John Kerry (Mass.) that would have set up such deadlines last year. And Clinton, like another 2008 Democratic hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), has in the past voted for supplemental funding bills for the war in Iraq before casting her "no" vote on Thursday....
As Clinton campaigns through, Iowa, she's trying to do a complicated thing: Introduce herself to voters while reminding them of the good parts of her past. This introduction -- or reintroduction -- is at times blatant.
A woman most known for her work in Arkansas, Washington and New York, she begins every speech with a reference to her upbringing in a "middle-class family in the middle of the country, Chicago." She notes her father's service in the Navy, and the fact that while her family paid her college tuition, she paid for her books in college and then borrowed to go to law school. (The words "Yale Law" are not used in this pitch).
Read the whole thing.
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