In reading Obama’s comments about Kennedy’s resolution, what I saw was a man who thinks it’s more important to keep his eye on his long-range goal — starting to pull troops out of Iraq over the next 4-6 months — instead of concentrating on short-term tactics. If there was a way to somehow “trade” a short-term escalation for getting the troops out of Iraq later this year, I suspect he might make it. He’s new to the Senate, and is still trying to see what all the options are for achieving that goal before he commits.
What’s important to me is that Obama spoke out against the war from the very beginning. That was back when the war was politically popular, and speaking against it in a state like Illinois was politically risky. I’m quite confident that a President Obama never would have gotten us into this mess; and that a President Obama would be working to get us out.
2008 is going to be a watershed year. It is my belief that voters will be looking for something new, and someone new; that they are tired of the politics of these past years. It is also my belief that centrist voters between the far right and passionate, long-suffering left are not going to be sitting with a checklist of issues and seeing who’s got the best match.
You may not like it, but they’re looking for personality and tempermant, how someone speaks and how they appear on TV. Am I happy that it matters how presidential candidates look on TV? Not really. But we’re the ones that are supposed to be living in a reality-based world. And that’s the reality of the world we live in right now.
It would be a great error to conclude from the Kerry candidacy that we need either a combative or a hardline left-wing candidate to run as a Democrat. Selecting Kerry because his resume seemed the “most electable” was a mistake, but the mistake was in not understanding that in the current environment, a candidate for president – or governor – needs to connect emotionally with voters. It’s different than running for U.S. Senate, where you’re one out of a hundred and more voters may be interested in your position on issues and constituent services than they are about your personality.
It’s is a mistake to choose a presidential nominee based on a scroll-length checklist of issues. There’s only one person around who would agree with me on everything on my list, and that’s me. And I’m not running.
I want someone to be in synch with many of my core values – such as the Constitution matters, and war is not to be used as a foreign policy whim to try to test a theory of reshaping global geopolitics. But beyond that, leadership is about more than a slate of issues. It’s about whether you can get people to believe in you, whether you can articulate a vision and rally support for it.
Barack Obama may not be the “most progressive” candidate in the race, but he very well may be the candidate most likely to get national support behind issues important to progressives.
your story isn’t complete. Obama actually had a fairly strong Republican opponent in Jack Ryan (a young and handsome guy who left investment banking to teach in an inner-city parochial school), and Obama could have lost that race (at least, it would have been reasonably close). Except that Ryan’s divorce became public at a very inopportune moment, with embarrassing sex scandals hitting the front pages, which resulted in Ryan having to withdraw. By that point, the GOP couldn’t recruit a decent candidate, and they ended up with Keyes.
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Interestingly, Ryan’s short-lived campaign buzz-word was “happiness” — “not only happiness for yourself but happiness to making other people fulfilled in their own lives.” Sounds oddly familiar…
You’re right, I should have mentioned that there was initially a better candidate than Keyes. However, as for that race being “reasonably close,” a Survey USA poll in June had Obama up 50-39 over Ryan (story here). In a late May Chicago Trib/WGN poll, Obama was up 52-30 among registered voters, with CNN noting another survey showed Obama had a 46% favorable among voters while Ryan was at 29% (CNN story here ). Given those numbers, I don’t see how that was shaping up to be a “reasonably close” election that Obama “could have lost.” If it had been even, another serious Republican candidate would have stepped in. There were others in the primary, none stepped forward to contest what was after all a Republican seat.
in early May 2006, SurveyUSA had Tom Reilly up 4 points on Deval Patrick. My point, obviously, is not that Obama wouldn’t have beaten Ryan — he probably would have. But a lot can happen between May and November in a real race that doesn’t involve a nutjob like Alan Keyes.
Most of the people who want troops out of Iraq sooner rather than later are not trying to check off every item on their list. They’ve prioritized this particular issue as a way to save American lives because our troops are targets for both Sunni and Shia militias, and George Bush can’t be trusted to calm down this civil war.
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As articulate as Obama is, these days his eloquence does not match the force of meaning in these simple words:
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You could hope that Congress will trade escalation now for Bush to pull out later. But I don’t know why anyone would put hope in George W. Bush holding up his end of that deal.
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Senator Kennedy is right, and I hope Kerry and Obama and Clinton join him.
who want the focus to be on drawing down the troops this year instead of simply opposing an escalation. I support both, and am waiting to see how Obama votes.
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However, I’m somewhat puzzled by people who support Edwards over Obama in part because of what Edwards is saying now about the war. Edwards voted to authorize the war. He’s admitted sorry about it now, and I do give him credit for that. But as I said above, Obama realized from the very beginning it was a bad idea and spoke against it when few people did so and it was politically unpopular to be against it.
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Leadership is standing up against this kind of stuff even at a time you risk being called “unpatriotic” and it’s politically very risky. Leadership is also understanding the situation as it is at the time, instead of only in hindsight. There are things I like about John Edwards, but I also understand there’s little cost to him in saying what he’s saying now.
So, to some extent, he gets a free pass…not saying this to sway anyone or against Obama, just pointing it out. I wouldn’t mind seeing if there’s any public quotes from Obama dating back before the authorization Bush used to go to war, though.
As for Edwards: Yes, he voted for it. Yes, that reflects poorly on his judgment. And yes, he is now doing a heck of a lot more to fight against it than Barack Obama.
As for Obama:
From 2002:
“I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.”
I’ll give him credit for that. I wish, though, he could give some sign that he did not check this kind of talk at the Senate door.
…which is what I suspected. The fact that he takes a few days to talk to colleagues and figure out what’s possible and where the support is, instead of just issuing statements within minutes, does not bother me.
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From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
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How much more do you want from him?
A Bob Herbert column from a few years ago (Times Select subscription required] mentions that Obama “delivered a stirring antiwar speech at a rally in October 2002.” He didn’t just make a statement against the war as the country was deciding whether or not to invade. He showed up at an antiwar rally and spoke.
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I found a link to his full speech from four years ago on The Network Journal Web site.
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Read that, keep in mind the immense popularity level of the war at the time, recall how those who opposed the war were called “unpatriotic,” and then decide whether Obama took a free pass.
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Ah, so before Obama was in the Senate he spoke plainly about this “dumb war,” but to speak plainly now would cost Obama substantially. So Senator Obama now indulges in the meandering Senate-speak that so many Democrats wished John Kerry would have ditched in 2004.
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I get the impression that being in the Senate made Obama limit his speech and actions and that makes me ask: with Obama in the White House, does he alter his speech and actions even more? Will pressures from advisers & “Wise Men of Washington” made President Obama act against his own conscience on the war? Because following his conscience would cost him?
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At least Ted Kennedy is not afraid to speak his conscience on this, nor to use his power in the direction his conscience tells him is right. And Kennedy’s proposal is popular, too!
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Come on, sharonmg–don’t you wish Obama would oppose funding this escalation?
Obama opposed the war from the start, while Edwards voted for it. I’ll accept Edwards apology. But I don’t think he gets to lecture people about how they should think about the war because he obvoiusly has proven he can make bad decisions in that area.
Winning elections is about communicating not, unfortunately, about being right. If it were about being right, there would be very, very few Republicans in Congress and Gore would be concluding a very successful second term.
…when you haven’t done anything to tick anyone off. Thise last decade in politics has seen has a triumph in the value of inexperience. I attribute this to a combination of antipathy toward public service on the left and right, and the emergence of attack politics.
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John Kerry and Hillary ar examples of that — they have so much in their background that there is something for everyone to oppose — the war, health care, spousal relations, what have you.
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So you’re better off to have no record — nothing to get mad at, and a charismatically large screen upon which to project your own wishlist. Hence, Obamamania — people love him because there’s nothing he’s done to dislike. So like George W., Scharzeneggar, or even Deval, Obama benefits from the fact that he’s never had to put his rhetoric to the test.*
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*And yes, I’m sure he made statements as a candidate or a state senator that can be dug up on different issues. It’s at the implementation of ideals that the rubber meets the road. Obama and those like him have never had to make tough choices, compromise to make things happen, and deal with a bottom line.
I think Obama is quite appealing too, although the appeal is wearing thin because there’s not much of substance behind it so far. So, I’m glad you’ve stepped up to clue us in. You seem to know about his work in IL.
Obama has long sought to bring coalitions together and work across party lines to get things accomplished.
Can you provide some examples of this (with links, preferrably)? I’d love to see a prez that can really precipitate cooperation across the isle or bring together disparate interest groups to work together. If he’s demonstarted that capacity in IL, I hope you will shine a bright light on it.
< a href=http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/10/barack_obama.html>This post from Obsidian Wings is the best summary I’ve found.
This post from Obsidian Wings is the best summary I’ve found.
I think Bob Herbert is one of the most progressive columnist voices at a major American newspaper, and he was touting Obama’s coalition building before Obama won the Senate election. I don’t think you can see the column if you’re not a Times Select subscriber, but some highlights:
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According to Business Week, that was the first such law in the nation. I recall at the time he kept the support of many law enforcement groups despite pushing for the bill, which was one of the things that impressed me at the time with him as a Senate candidate.
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From his campaign Web site for Senate, he “a chief architect and sponsor of the first state campaign finance reform legislation in 25 years, and has helped toughen rules governing government contracting and procurement,” which I also liked.
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From a Salon profile:
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