Let’s get this Party started
Sen. Clinton insists her position on war same as Obama’s
Saying Democrats are “united” in calling for a change in course in Iraq, Clinton brushed off comments by Obama that his opposition to the war in 2002 sets him apart from the former First Lady, who voted to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq.
In an interview on Wednesday night, President Clinton once again tried to conflate his wife’s record on the war with that of Sen. Obama. As quoted by the Hotline:
CLINTON: Because in the beginning, there was this impression that he was the only one that was really against the president’s policy in Iraq, which I don’t think is accurate, but it nevertheless had some legs out there.
His voting record and Hillary’s are almost identical, I think, on all the relevant issues.
Asked about the comments yesterday, Sen. Obama didn’t mince words:
“I suppose that’s true if you leave out the fact that she authorized it, and supported it, and I said it was a bad idea,” said Obama. “That’s a fairly major difference.”
It begs the question: Can you smell what Barack is cooking?
Much is being made in some quarters over Sen. Obama’s comment in Iowa that there’s “at least one senator in Iowa who could be helpful” in overriding President Bush’s veto of Congress’s Iraq funding bill. In response, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley — the subject of Sen. Obama’s remark — called the comment “not senatorial,” adding that “when you’re in another state, you don’t take pokes at a fellow senator.”
Boo freaking hoo. According to the Chicago Tribune, Grassley went on to assert that “he would never go into Illinois and tell Obama’s constituents to ‘get on him about something.’” “You know what really makes it less presidential,” Grassley said, is “I’m not running for president. I’m not one of his opponents.”
Except that, on the issue of the war, you are.
Inexplicably, the Trib titles their report on the exchange “Obama’s Faux Pas,” as if encouraging people to encourage their representatives to override the veto is somehow a “mistake” — as if adhering to the “gentlemanly” senatorial protocol is somehow more important than the moral imperative of ending an immoral war.
Sorry Chuck, but it looks like the U.S. Senate is no longer a safe haven for thin-skinned whiners. To reappropriate a favorite old phrase, You’re ass is Grassley, and Sen. Obama’s the lawnmower.
UPDATE: This evening’s Post headline: “Obama Renews Pressing Grassley on Iraq.”
Sen. Obama weighs in today, on the fourth anniversary of President Bush’s mind-bogglingly unjustified “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the S.S. Hubris, with a truly sobering smackdown:
Four years after President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared ‘Mission Accomplished,’ we are still in a war where more than one hundred American service members have died in just the month of April. We grieve for them today and urge the President to avoid making another tragic mistake by signing the bill that will end this war and bring our troops home.
We are now one signature away from ending this war. The majority of the American people and their Congress now agree that there is no military solution to the conflict in Iraq, and that the best way to pressure the warring factions to reach a political settlement that can end this war is still a phased withdrawal of American forces with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 30th, 2008. It is time to end this war so we can bring our troops home and redeploy our forces to help fight the broader struggle against terrorism and other threats of this new century.
A compelling email to Obama supporters just arrived. Here’s the lede:
A piece of paper will soon be placed on George Bush’s desk in the Oval Office.
By picking up a pen and signing his name to it, he could end the war in Iraq.
The House and Senate united and passed a bill that would provide for our troops now and begin a redeployment from Iraq to bring them home.
We’re just one signature away from ending the tragic mistake that has cut short thousands of American lives, cost tens of billions of dollars, and destroyed America’s global moral leadership. But only if the president signs the bill.
It’s a powerful statement, and a sobering thought: with a single signature, we could begin a new direction for American foreign policy, for American global leadership, and finally start closing one of our nation’s darkest chapters.
If you want to encourage President Bush to do the right thing, just click on the image below.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Sen. Obama closing the gap with Sen. Clinton. According to the report, the data “suggests doubts about his electability are diminishing.”
In particular:
[T]he poll shows Mr. Obama trailing Mrs. Clinton by 31% to 36%; 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards runs a solid third with 20%. Last month, Mr. Obama lagged 12 percentage points behind.
You can see the complete poll data here — which includes 56 percent public support for the Democratic Congress’s decision to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, as opposed to 37 percent support for President Bush’s insistence against it.
Sen. Obama seized on comments by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post, in which Gates said that “demands in the U.S. Congress for a timeline to withdraw American troops from Iraq are constructive because they exert pressure on Iraq’s leaders to forge compromises.”
Gates continued:
“The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact . . . in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.”
[Cue record scratch] Wait…what? President Bush’s own Secretary of Defense thinks the Democratic Congress’s efforts to enforce a timeline are “constructive”? You mean he doesn’t think they’re aiding the terrorists? He’s not impugning their patriotism or commitment to the troops? And he’s willing to express this opinion publicly? Who is this guy?
Sen. Obama underscored this rare administration candor via press release:
“After the President has repeatedly ignored the will of Congress and the American people, his own Secretary of Defense now recognizes that the only way to pressure the Iraqi government toward a political settlement is to make clear that American troops will not be in Iraq forever. President Bush has had a long history of ignoring the advice of his commanders on the ground, but let’s hope that he follows the advice of his Defense Secretary so that we can finally begin the process of ending the war in Iraq in a responsible way.”
Secretary Gates’s remarks may not make him the most popular guy in the Bush administration this week. Then again, it seems like these days being well-liked within the Bush administration is kind of like being the most popular kid at vampire school. Sure they think you’re cool, but at the end of the day you just know you it’s going to come back and bite you.
A recent Salon article profiled Brig. Gen. Michael J. Kussman, who chaired a 2004 task force that produced a report “documenting the complaints of wounded soldiers and their families about conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center,” and who subsequently did nothing to address those complaints. In classic Bush administration form, Kussman’s inaction has earned him a nomination to be undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In response, Sen. Obama has written an open letter to President Bush questioning the appointment. This follows his proposed legislation to improve conditions for soldiers recovering at active duty military hospitals, something we noted here.
Read the letter, after the jump.
An email from MoveOn.org reports that an online vote shows that “Barack Obama is MoveOn members’ top choice to lead the country out of Iraq.” This vote followed a virtual town hall meeting where the candidates discussed their views on handling the war.
Given that Sen. Obama has staked out a rational position on the war — looking to wrap it up responsibly and quickly, but not in a way that could leave the region unstable and a potential haven for terrorists — a vote of confidence from a progressive community like MoveOn is encouraging.
UPDATE: Here are Sen. Obama’s closing remarks from the MoveOn forum:
Sen. Obama released a statement today in response to comments by Sen. McCain encouraging congressional Democrats to “heed the advice of one of their leading candidates for President, Senator Obama, and immediately pass a new bill to provide support to our troops in Iraq without substituting their partisan interests for those of our troops and our country.”
Speaking about the realities of Iraq War funding, last week Sen. Obama observed that if President Bush vetoes the current Senate bill that funds the war but sets a withdrawal date, Congress “will provide the money without the withdrawal timeline the White House objects to because no lawmaker ‘wants to play chicken with our troops,’” according to the AP.
Here is Sen. Obama’s response to Sen. McCain, which takes particular aim at McCain’s attempt to convince voters that Iraq is becoming stable by taking a high-profile and heavily-armed excursion into a Baghdad market. As the AP notes, “The market has been hit by several recent bombings, including one in February that killed 137 people.”
Progress in Iraq cannot be measured by the same ideological fantasies that got us into this war, it must be measured by the reality of the facts on the ground, and today those sobering facts tell us to change our strategy and bring a responsible end to this war.
No matter how much this Administration wishes it to be true, the idea that the situation in Iraq is improving because it only takes a security detail of 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships to walk through a market in the middle of Baghdad is simply not credible or reflective of the facts on the ground.
What we need today is a surge in honesty. The truth is, the Iraqis have made little progress toward the political solution between Shiia and Sunni which is the last, best hope to end this war. I believe that letting the Iraqi government know America will not be there forever is the best way to pressure the warring factions toward this political settlement, which is why my plan begins a phased withdrawal from Iraq on May 1st, 2007, with the goal of removing all combat troops by March 31st, 2008.
After stunning the political world with his record numbers of contributors and dollars last week, Sen. Obama is coming out swinging on the right issues. His first order of business? Helping the roughly 200,000 homeless war veterans who have been neglected by this administration find affordable housing.
From the Boston Globe:
The Illinois senator said he would introduce legislation that he calls Homes for Heroes, which would establish grant and voucher programs to encourage development of affordable housing targeted for veterans.
“Veterans are far more likely to be homeless than nonveterans and part of it is because we’re not providing services to them as they transition out of the service,” Obama said in an interview Friday before a campaign rally. “Part of it is because there is just not enough affordable housing.”
Later in the article, Sen. Obama observes that “one of the things I think we did learn from Vietnam was that whether you are for or against a war, everyone has to honor and respect the service and sacrifice of the troops.” The article adds that Sen. Obama “said the government spends billions on the war but has consistently shortchanged programs for veterans, whose needs should be a top priority.”
This is one of those rare winning issues for Democrats, at once positioning Democrats as strong on military matters while underscoring Republicans’ unforgivable lethargy and unwillingness to take care of the soldiers they shipped to battle. It has the added bonus of being a moral imperative. And Sen. Obama frames it just right.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, Sen. Obama had this to say about the situation in Iraq — and Sen. McCain’s insistence that the United States maintain an indefinite presence there:
“John McCain may believe that it’s an option for us to maintain an indefinite occupation of Iraq, regardless what happens in terms of politics within Iraq, so that we’re every year sending $100 billion over to Iraq, so that every year we’re seeing hundreds or thousands of young Americans dying, so that we continue to see a deterioration of America’s standing in the world,” the Democratic presidential candidate told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I don’t think that serves the best interests of the United States, and I don’t think it will ultimately result if the kind of stabilization in Iraq that’s necessary.”
Sen. Obama also expressed his thoughts about executive privilege, the Iranian-UK hostage situation, and his positive relationship with Rev. Al Sharpton. Read more (and watch the video) here.
First CNN sent a reporter to Jakarta following FOX News’s fallacious reporting on Sen. Obama’s schooling. Now ABC has analyzed Sen. Obama’s position on the Iraq War following the Clinton’s campaign’s disingenuous claims about its consistency.
Their finding: “However much others try to fuzz up the record,” Sen. Obama has had a “consistent anti-war message” and “stood out” for “opposing the war quite firmly when the war was overwhelmingly popular.” The reporters analyzed Sen. Obama’s interviews and remarks — including those cited by the Clinton campaign — and concluded that his opponent’s spin on his position is precisely that: spin.
The article quotes Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton, who sums it all up:
“The important thing here is that Obama has been 100% consistent in his opposition to the war, and now he has a responsible plan to end the conflict,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “Even when you look at the statements he’s made about others who supported the war, it’s clear that he’s in sharp opposition to the war.”
ABC also has a comprehensive video to back up their findings entitled “Obama Opposes Iraq War From Start.”
Given Sen. Obama’s consistency, it’s understandable that Josh Gerstein at the New York Sun is saying that “why Mrs. Clinton’s team would want Mr. Obama’s strongly anti-war statements from 2002 in broader circulation is beyond me.”
Us too.
If I was the Clinton campaign, and I was watching as the biggest applause line my main Democratic competitor received every night was his assertion that we must find a solution to a war that “never should have been authorized,” I’d want to do what I could to neutralize that advantage.
If I was sneaky enough, I’d probably try to conflate my candidate’s record with his, and suggest that there is “very little difference” in their Senate voting records on the issue.
If I was truly disingenuous, I might even try to muddy his crystal clear stance on the subject, perhaps by taking comments he made in support of Sen. Kerry and John Edwards back in 2004 out of context to suggest that he hasn’t been opposed to the war from the beginning.
Yes, I suppose if I were desperate enough, I might do these things — though I hope I would have enough scruples to abstain from this sort of political hackery, relying instead on my candidate’s record. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for Mark Penn, Sen. Clinton’s chief strategist. His candidate’s record on the war is proving a major obstacle, and so he has apparently decided that smearing her competitor is a better strategy than debating the issue on the merits.
Sen. Obama blasted the Bush administration’s failure to provide appropriate — or even adequate — care for wounded U.S. troops returning from battle, the AP reports today. Speaking to the nation’s largest firefighters union, Sen. Obama “said he’s tired of officials who talk about supporting the troops but don’t provide adequate health care.”
Here is the AP’s coverage of Sen. Obama’s remarks (available in full here):
“They don’t do anything except slap a yellow ribbon on the back of their SUV,” the Illinois senator said during a parade of Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls appearing before the nation’s largest firefighters union.
“When our veterans come home, I don’t want them forgotten in run-down buildings,” Obama said to loud applause from the International Association of Fire Fighters.
The union counts about 1,000 members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, with many more who have returned from the war and continue to serve in the National Guard and Reserves. Revelations of poor outpatient care at Walter Reed Medical Center clearly has touched a nerve.
Shortly after the revelations about the conditions at Walter Reed, Sen. Obama proposed legislation that would “cut red tape, improve service, and require frequent inspections of all active duty military hospitals,” as we noted here previously.
