Say what you will about Andrew Sullivan but, he did a good job with highlighting some parts of the speech. I saw the speech on Cspan2 and it was eloquent and powerful in a subduded way. He really weaved everything into it and you felt you were listening to a master speaker.
What I enjoyed is that for months people and the media has been dumping on him, twisting his words and meaning and trying to pin him into a certain storyline that was false.
Today, he answered his critics in a very classy way. Especially the media.
This is more like it (his speech last night at DePaul University). The war is his issue; and it is his ace against Clinton:
The conventional thinking in Washington has a way of buying into stories that make political sense even if they don't make practical sense. We were told that the only way to prevent Iraq from getting nuclear weapons was with military force. Some leading Democrats echoed the Administration's erroneous line that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We were counseled by some of the most experienced voices in Washington that the only way for Democrats to look tough was to talk, act and vote like a Republican.
As Ted Sorensen's old boss President Kennedy once said "the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war - and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears." In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn't tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.
But it doesn't end there. Because the American people weren't just failed by a President - they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress - "a coequal branch of government" - that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let's be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.
Then this: the most forthright declaration in this campaign that the detention and interrogation policies of this indecent and un-American administration must be ended, and repudiated:
To lead the world, we must lead by example. We must be willing to acknowledge our failings, not just trumpet our victories. And when I'm President, we'll reject torture - without exception or equivocation; we'll close Guantanamo; we'll be the country that credibly tells the dissidents in the prison camps around the world that America is your voice, America is your dream, America is your light of justice.
I've been waiting a long time to hear a politician say these words as starkly and as passionately as he or she should. McCain crumbled; Clinton is too careful. Obama has come through.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
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