(Or, as a variant, if she had apologized for her vote, Edwards-style?)

No.

People must understand: Clinton’s decision on the AUMF is part and parcel of the person she had to be to get where she was.

She was a strong woman. She didn’t take any bullshit. She stood up for herself, and she fought for what she thought was right.

To be able to survive in the public eye as a legitimate politician, Clinton had to learn how to steel herself and keep fighting, even when everyone else was telling her that she was wrong. Because that is what it takes to be a high-profile female politician in today’s country.

Relatedly, she had to cultivate a reputation of strength, because the Bossy Butch Bitch is the only woman the public can tolerate — not appreciate, but tolerate — as a high-profile leader, especially one in charge of things that are coded as masculine.

There is a reason Clinton has publicly refused to apologize for her vote on the AUMF or on Kyl-Lieberman, and for accepting money from lobbyists. If she is anything like the strong women I know, and my suspicion is she is: she has carefully cultivated her convictions, searching deep to find the truest truths she knows, down below the miles of muck with which our society imbues those of the female persuasion. And she has built a fortress upon a foundation of those truths, with thick strong walls and a careful defense system.

Because she knows that if she is to be the person she truly is inside, she is going to need it.

So she will not back down. Because if she does, it erases everything she stands for, stands on.

(And, you know, watching the campaigns of her husband and each Democratic nominee to come since, with their primary media narratives of waffle and flip-flop, maybe she learned something?)

If Hillary Rodham Clinton had voted against the AUMF, she would have been an entirely different person, and an entirely different politician. And she would not be where she is today. She may not even have been where she was then.

And, for better or worse, that is the fault of the system that puts her at an immediate disadvantage, the system she had to learn intimately, the system she had to manipulate to get her where she wanted to go. No person can operate outside the system; if they want to do anything within it, they have to work within its rules.

And that is what Clinton is, and was, doing.