She's not believable when she tries to explain her IWR vote because she can't give the real answer:
she was positioning herself for 2008.
![](http://images.salon.com/comics/tomo/2007/12/17/tomo/story.jpg)
http://nymag.com/news/features/43341 /
The TestInside the Clinton and Obama war rooms, they’ve spent months preparing for Super Tuesday by shaping and reshaping two candidates with similar politics — but very different worldviews. By John Heilemann
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Penn defends himself as a champion of the middle class and argues that, as he put it to me, “small policies can sometimes lead to big changes and promote big ideas.” Having helped engineer Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 and both of Hillary’s Senate conquests, he enjoys the abiding trust of both Clintons—an unusual position. And for much of 2007, the campaign that he devised for HRC appeared to be working like a charm. Its fundamental premise was her inevitability. Its tactical aims were focused on presenting Clinton as the Democrat readiest to be president “on day one.” Its strategic goal was to neutralize the question that the campaign regarded as her Achilles’ heel: her gender.
As Clinton admitted to me, “I really believed I had to prove in this race from the very beginning that a woman could be president and a woman could be commander-in-chief. I thought that was my primary mission.”
But in the weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton began to realize she’d made “a fundamental miscalculation,” she said. “I frankly made a wrong assumption about how to present myself to the country.” Thus her late-stage bid to convince the voters of Iowa that she was human after all, an effort embodied in all its absurdity and desperation by her now-infamous “likability tour”—a tour that kicked off just a matter of days after she’d first gone negative on Obama, announcing, “Now the fun part starts.”
![](http://nymag.com/news/features/election080204_5_560.jpg)