Before voting for the Iraq war? For someone who prides herself on detailed knowledge of every issue, this is glaringly out of character. How can you hold forth for 16 minutes on the fine details of your health plan if you did not do your basic homework for the most important Senate vote in a generation? Has Senator Clinton ever given an explanation for this lapse?
Upton Sinclair probably had an explanation. He said that
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Perhaps it applies to women also.
It is reported that the Chair of the Senate Committee told Senator Clinton what was in the National Intelligence Estimate and urged her to read it before voting. Has Senator Clinton ever explained why she didn't do that? If not, a plausible explanation is this:
She knew it would go against the vote she had already decided to make for political reasons. She needed to prove she was tough on military matters,as she knew she would be running for President some day. So she decided not to read it. As if that way the bad information would just go away.
Does she have a pattern of not listening to inconvenient news? One way to tell how a candidate will perform as President is to look at how she runs her campaign. Earlier this year, her campaign burned through $140 million and was almost bankrupt just before Super-Tuesday. Why didn't Hilary Clinton stay on top of the finances? Why did her staff not keep her in the loop? When she loaned the campaign $5 million dollars she did not let the then campaign manager know about it.
There is more. She never acknowledged that Obama had won the South Carolina primary. Instead she went on national TV to give her routine stump speech, after flying out of SC. This is not a one-time thing: she continued this pattern on following primaries. It may not be rudeness: by all accounts Senator Clinton is a charming and considerate person.
The emerging picture here is of someone who does not confront bad news, or news that requires her to take unpleasant, but necessary action. How prepared will Senator Clinton be, to answer that 3am phone call if she only listens to what she wants to hear?