NYT: Slowly, Clinton Shifts on War, Quieting Foes
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and PATRICK HEALY
Published: August 4, 2007
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — A little more than a year ago, before Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the race for the White House, she drew a storm of boos from an audience of liberal Democrats here as she declared that it would be a mistake to set a “date certain” for withdrawing American troops from Iraq.
But before another Democratic audience last month in Des Moines, Mrs. Clinton drew applause when she declared that it was time to begin “ending this war — not next year, not next month, but today.”
The senator, who voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq, has over the past year gradually repositioned herself on the war, the issue that her advisers have long viewed as the biggest obstacle to her winning the presidential nomination. In a series of speeches, interviews and Senate votes, Mrs. Clinton has brought her stance much more in line with Democratic primary voters and the positions of most of her Democratic rivals — and has done it, so far, without sustained accusations of flip-flopping.
Her advisers said any evolution was the result of policy judgment reflecting the changing circumstances of the war, rather than a politically calculated repackaging. In many ways, her shift reflects changes in the nation’s view of whether a positive outcome is possible in Iraq.
The degree to which Mrs. Clinton has actually defused the issue will get a test on Saturday when she appears with fellow Democrats in a debate in Chicago before an audience of liberal bloggers, one of the most intensely antiwar constituencies in the party and one that has been particularly skeptical of — and often hostile toward — Mrs. Clinton....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/us/politics/04clinton.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin 
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