Iraq takes all the oxygen

MORE THAN half a year before New Hampshire voters will cast the first primary ballots in the 2008 presidential election, last night's debate by the Democratic candidates saw the two front-runners -- Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- already trying to gloss over differences within the party on the Iraq war and run as though the general election were already underway. Former senator John Edwards, however, staked out a tougher antiwar position and insisted there were differences among the candidates.

Among the eight contenders who otherwise share similar views on hot-button issues like gays and lesbians in the military and immigration, this disagreement produced the only tension in the two hours at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. It also led to the one stinging rebuke when Obama responded to Edwards's criticism of his Iraq war votes in the Senate by pointing out that he, unlike Edwards, had opposed the war from the beginning. "You're about four and a half years too late," Obama said to the North Carolinian.

But Edwards, apparently convinced that his views on the war offer an opportunity to rally the party's antiwar base and move him up in the polls closer to Clinton and Obama, would not give ground. While Clinton said, "The differences among us are minor, the differences with the Republicans are major," Edwards insisted that one difference was his willingness to acknowledge that his 2002 vote in the Senate to authorize force was a mistake -- an admission that Clinton, who also voted for the war, has refused to make. He said that it will be crucial for whoever is the next president to be someone who is "honest with the American people."

For all the back and forth about the war, however, there were few specifics, beyond Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich's suggestion to stop all funding of the war, about how each would deal with it in January 2009. Senator Joseph Biden did not even mention his proposal to divide Iraq into autonomous regions based on religious and ethnic differences. The audience was better served by the discussion over the candidates' proposals for broadening the number of Americans who have health insurance, with Edwards and Obama getting credit for having the most detailed proposals, outside of Kucinich's endorsement of a national, non profit single-payer system.

On style points, all generally acquitted themselves well. Clinton showed leadership by resisting the moderator's clumsy attempt to force the candidates to give instant yea-or-nay answers on complex issues like ending the genocide in Darfur. This debate yielded few sound bites. But it made at least one thing clear: dealing with the incumbent president's war in Iraq will be the defining issue -- and most divisive one -- for the Democratic candidates trying to succeed him.