Slowly, Clinton Shifts on War, Quieting Foes

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and PATRICK HEALY

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.

But there is already evidence that she has made progress in reducing the intensity of the opposition to her among some of her most fervent antiwar opponents and in building support among the broader universe of Democrats who oppose the war.

A New York Times/CBS News poll in July 2006 found that among Democrats who said the invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, 56 percent said they had a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton’s performance. A year later, that figure had risen to 69 percent. Her standing during that period among all Democrats has also shown improvement. On the campaign trail, antiwar protests at her appearances are less frequent and less loud.

“Thanks to her votes on defunding the war and supporting a timetable for withdrawal, she has defused the war issue as a problem for her, and her 2002 vote for the war, to quite an extent,” said Medea Benjamin, a leader of the antiwar group Code Pink, whose members once regularly booed and heckled Mrs. Clinton whenever she spoke about the war.

“There’s still a passionate minority of us who believe the fact she won’t apologize for her war vote is a big deal,” Ms. Benjamin said.

But, she added, “she has gone a long way to changing things.”

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal Daily Kos Web site, said Mrs. Clinton had “done a great job of blurring on the war.”

Mr. Moulitsas, whose Web site inspired this weekend’s gathering of bloggers in Chicago, cited Mrs. Clinton’s statements that she would leave a sizable military force in Iraq even after reducing the American military role there, saying that distinction was lost in the way she had presented her antiwar credentials.

“I don’t know if policy and rhetoric are aligned,” Mr. Moulitsas said. “But people don’t see the policy paper on our side; they hear what she says, and she talks a great game.”

Aides to Mrs. Clinton’s rivals argued she would still have a problem in the early voting states — Iowa and New Hampshire — where antiwar sentiments are high and Democrats are aware of her evolution on the issue.

“The people for whom the war is a No. 1 issue, she is always going to have a problem,” said Jonathan Prince, a deputy campaign manager for John Edwards. “The folks who are deciding their vote based on the war and are antiwar are quite aware that she has tacked back and forth on this.”

As a senator from North Carolina in 2002, Mr. Edwards also voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, but he later apologized for his vote — something Mrs. Clinton has not done — and has become an outspoken critic of the war.

Nonetheless, advisers to Mrs. Clinton’s opponents said she had made herself a much more elusive target. They said it had become more difficult to attack her for her history of supporting the war — and for refusing to apologize for her vote — than it had been when she had resisted setting a deadline for getting troops out.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton is not getting booed on the issue the way she was six months ago suggests, as some war critics and the senator’s advisers said on Friday, that it is not easy for an opponent of the war to jeer Mrs. Clinton as she is saying, “We need to bring our combat troops home from Iraq, starting right now,” as she did to a labor audience in Washington in June.

Mrs. Clinton has benefited because antiwar groups in Washington that have been pushing for Congress to cut off financing for the war have become more pragmatic, turning their heat on moderate Republicans who supported President Bush, and away from Democrats like Mrs. Clinton who once supported the war but have now changed.

Beyond that, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers suggested that she executed the shift with minimal political cost because there was no one moment in which she dramatically telegraphed a turn-around. From that perspective, they argued, her decision to resist calls from war opponents to apologize for her vote authorizing the war proved to be the right one, since it could have offered a critics an opportunity to label her as inconsistent — a line of attack that hurt Senator John Kerry in his 2004 presidential campaign and one that could have complicated Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to convince the nation that it can trust her to be commander in chief.

An adviser to one of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents, who did not want to be quoted by name offering praise for the way she was handling the issue, described the senator’s change as “more of a slide than a flip-flop.”

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers pointed to statements she has made and stances she has taken over the past year that have repositioned her. Those include her decision, this spring, to vote in favor of a troop withdrawal timetable, and her decision to support a cut off of money for the war. She signaled the shift with a speech to the Democratic National Committee in February saying, “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January of 2009, as president I will.”

Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of State, who is advising Mrs. Clinton on Iraq and other foreign policy issues, said, “Through the spring she became increasingly frustrated with the fact that the administration didn’t seem to listen.”

“You begin to kind of say, ‘O.K., now what? We need an answer,’ ” Ms. Albright said. “She was feeling a necessity to send a stronger and stronger message.”