In New Hampshire on Saturday, Senator Hillary Clinton got visibly testy when a voter asked her if she would admit, without nuance, that her vote to authorize the Iraq war was a mistake. Her reply began with the tired claim that she had "taken responsibility for that vote." Which means what? "Taking responsibility" in contemporary political discourse means you want to change the subject. And, her demeanor suggested that, only three weeks into the race, she is already tired of defending her Iraq war vote. The previous weekend, in Washington, Hillary proclaimed that, if she had been president in 2002, the United States would never have begun this war. That may be true, but it misses the point that, as a senator, she did not put on the brakes with the tools she had at hand--her vote and her voice. Even her "If I knew then what I know now" line is weak: Was she unaware of the tensions between Sunni and Shia for several centuries? Did she fail to recall the ethnic genocide that engulfed Yugoslavia when its strongman died? As for the false intelligence about WMD, the absence of WMD should have made the war easier, not harder. What, precisely, does she know now that she did not know then? The weekend before that, on her first campaign swing through Iowa, Clinton was challenged on Iraq and replied: "As a senator from New York, I lived through 9/11 and I am still dealing with the aftereffects. I may have a slightly different take on this from some of the other people who will be coming through here." This was once one of Dick Cheney's talking points, moving a conversation about Iraq to a conversation about 9/11, but even he no longer tries to make the link. What is going on? Three weekends and three pitiful responses to the most obvious question facing the electorate. I suspect--indeed all of America suspects--that the reason Clinton has such difficulty giving an account of her 2002 vote is because she cannot give the one truthful answer: She voted for the war because it appeared political suicide to do otherwise at the time. Her calculations did not have to do with the number of troops needed to reconstruct Baghdad. They had to do with swing voters in the 2008 election. Hillary's vote to authorize the war in Iraq five years ago may or may not cost her the nomination. But her obfuscation today might. It reinforces the thing people really dread about her--the relentless ambition and calculation, the reaching and over-reaching, and the sense that, if she had lived 500 years ago, Machiavelli might have written The Princess. --Michael Sean Winters