What if Hillary Clinton had won in 2008?

The long tail of a fateful vote for war

Almost everyone I know says they were against the Iraq War as a teenager, which I’m sure is true.

Unfortunately, I was 21 at the time and also writing on the internet, so I’m on record as having agreed with Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Tony Blair, among others, that authorizing the use of force was appropriate.

By the summer of 2003, it was clear that Iraq did not, in fact, have an advanced nuclear weapons program and the whole thing had been a huge mistake. I was quite angry about this — maybe even more so than those who’d never believed the arguments in favor of war — and advocated for Howard Dean in the 2004 primary. That clearly did not work out, but in 2008, when seemingly everyone agreed the war was a mistake, I thought it was crazy that Democrats were leaning toward Clinton. As a result, I became a strident supporter of Barack Obama’s primary campaign. He won the nomination and became president and, I think, did a pretty great job at it.

That said, in terms of my personal beef with Democrats who helped sell the country on the Iraq War, that election didn’t really work out. Obama made Clinton his Secretary of State (and Biden his Vice President) and seems to have made some kind of deal to make her his successor. And this has always made me question what exactly the 2008 primary was actually about because Obama’s decision to give her the top foreign policy job seemed to invalidate one of his core arguments of the primary. And it also makes me wonder: What if Clinton had been the nominee in 2008?

Many roads to a Clinton presidency

This is a counterfactual where many different paths lead to the same result.