Presumption in Favor of the Anti-War Candidate

In the midst of the below-referenced posts pointing out the highly disingenuous attempts to claim that Clinton was not, in fact, a strong contemporaneous supporter of the war, Yglesias notes this about Obama:

Also note: “But all of this cannot come to pass until we bring an end to this war in Iraq. Most of you know I opposed this war from the start. I thought it was a tragic mistake.” My instinct is that this is going to be a powerful point.

I think this is right. As I think I’ve said before, I think that when choosing a candidate, Democratic primary voters should have a strong presumption in favor of people who didn’t support The Fiasco, for both political and substantive reasons. Not an irrefutable presumption, but a strong presumption. With respect to the politics, I think it’s clear that Edwards’ forthright admission that he made a mistake is preferable to Clinton’s attempt to pretend that she didn’t really support the war, but neither of these are really good options. Edwards is admitting a colossal error in judgment on what will be the central question of the 2008 election. Clinton has to claim to be exceptionally (and implausibly) naive about what Bush was up to, and in addition everyone knows that she made the error in judgment anyway. Given the inevitable centrality of Iraq to the 2008 election, running a candidate who was pro-war at the time is squandering a major potential edge, and I think a candidate has to have a lot of other virtues (and their rivals a lot of potential defects) to overcome it (although Edwards’ early repudiation makes him a little less vulnerable.)