"Stop the Fearmongering"

Matt Stoller:

If Cillizza quoted Clinton accurately, then we've got a problem.

Clinton also sought to draw a contrast with some of her Democratic rivals on the issue of terrorism. "Some people may be running who may tell you that we don't face a real threat from terrorism," she said. "I am not one of those."

Who exactly? I'd like to hear a reporter ask her just who she means.

UPDATE: I asked Peter Daou about this, and he tells me that her quote is accurate. He is not sure about the context, and says that Clinton could have been referring to Republican candidates. He promises to get back to us tonight or tomorrow.

In other related news, Clinton is looking for antiwar surrogates in Congress.

This is interesting: A high-level Democrat tells me that several of Hillary Clinton's senior advisers are reaching out to top Dem donors and other political leaders with connections in Congress to ask them to make Hillary's case on the Iraq war privately to highly-visible antiwar members of Congress.

The idea appears to be to get these go-betweens to suggest to prominent antiwar members of Congress such as Russ Feingold and John Murtha that they either back Hillary or vouch for her position on Iraq.

Clinton is definitely feeling pressure on Iraq. The narrative is morphing into a slightly different form, that Clinton is prisoner of a Beltway establishment. Here's Paul Krugman.

And there’s another reason the admission by Mr. Edwards that he was wrong is important. If we want to avoid future quagmires, we need a president who is willing to fight the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, which still — in spite of all that has happened — equates hawkishness with seriousness about national security, and treats those who got Iraq right as somehow unsound. By admitting his own error, Mr. Edwards makes it more credible that he would listen to a wider range of views.

In truth, it’s the second issue, not the first, that worries me about Mrs. Clinton. Although she’s smart and sensible, she’s very much the candidate of the Beltway establishment — an establishment that has yet to come to terms with its own failure of nerve and judgment over Iraq. Still, she’s at worst a triangulator, not a megalomaniac; she’s not another Dick Cheney.

Stay tuned.

Atrios agrees.