The Times' Pat Healy has an interesting piece today on Hillary Clinton, Miss Inevitable.

One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq.

Several advisers, friends and donors said in interviews that they had urged her to call her vote a mistake in order to appease antiwar Democrats, who play a critical role in the nominating process. Yet Mrs. Clinton herself, backed by another faction, never wanted to apologize — even if she viewed the war as a mistake — arguing that an apology would be a gimmick.[...]

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Why is this horseshit? Read on.

One of the enduring characteristics of Clinton - and arguably, the defining essence of Clintonism - is that she will say what it is that she, via focus groups, has determined you want to hear. If you dislike flag-burning, sure, she'll sponsor legislation against that. If you dislike such legislation, sure, she'll vote against it. This is no different.

The most crippling burden on Hillary at this point in the cycle is precisely the perception that she stands for nothing but her own advancement, a perception fed by this demonstrated willingness to take any and all positions her team has determined to poll well. A well-publicized internal discussion - it doesn't get more public than the front page of The New York Times, not with this tight-lipped campaign that controls every aspect of its own sell - in which she decides to stick to her guns on the war defuses that perception. Given that the framing of her as a panderer is arguably more dangerous to her than even antiwar anger directed at her, this is, and should be seen as, merely another piece of smart positioning. One that, you can be sure, will be thrown overboard as soon as it has done the trick of establishing a countermeme to 'Hillary the panderer'. Prepare to hear, sometime closer to actual voting time, a heartfelt statement about how she's changed her mind; meanwhile, she needs to convince you that she has some backbone, and there couldn't be any clearer simulacrum of that than this announcement.

Remember, there is a year to go. Hillary simply does not take politically painful positions. She has the time, the money and the institutional support to ride out the backlash this will cause. Meanwhile, she'd like you to think she has some principles. Or, to quote one of her advisers:

“She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ’04,” said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008.”

Don't be fooled. There is no shocker here. And more crucially, no backbone.