If words are just words, as described by the Clinton campaign, then what do we call votes?
Ever since it became apparent that Senator Obama would be a force to be reckoned with, there has been a concerted effort to redefine the stated positions and actions of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama by the Clinton campaign. Clinton’s vote for the IRW has been portrayed as a “vote for diplomacy”, while trying to portray Obama’s speech against the IRW as either political positioning, or a lucky guess.
First, I want to start with the July 27th 2004 Chicago Tribune article containing the anti-Obama crowds favorite rip, “There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage”. This is usually presented in two ways.
1) They drop “at this stage” in an attempt to portray Obama as in total agreement with Bush in contrast to his key Iraq War speech; the flip-flop v1.0.
2) When they got called on that, they left “at this stage” in the quote, but still refused to include the context including this clarifier; “The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute”; the flip-flop v2.0.
Both of these permutations of this “cut and paste” approach to discrediting Obama on his Iraq War position completely avoid the full context of what he was referencing. So let’s see what he actually said:
"On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago," Obama said during a luncheon meeting with editors and reporters of Tribune newspapers. "There's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute."
-snip-
Obama, a state senator from Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, opposed the Iraq invasion before the war. But he now believes U.S. forces must remain to stabilize the war-ravaged nation -- a policy not dissimilar to the current approach of the Bush administration.
The problem, Obama said, is the low regard for Bush in the international community.
"How do you stabilize a country that is made up of three different religious and in some cases ethnic groups, with minimal loss of life and minimum burden to the taxpayers?" Obama said. "I am skeptical that the Bush administration, given baggage from the past three years, not just on Iraq. ... I don't see them having the credibility to be able to execute. I mean, you have to have a new administration to execute what the Bush administration acknowledges has to happen."
So, in reading the qualifications surrounding the “quote” used to discredit Senator Obama on his consistency on the Iraq issue, we find that not only does the Senator remain true to his original stance, but shows both the root deficiency of Bush’s proposed strategy, and where the Democratic Nominee stands, and by political default, his supporters i.e. Hillary Clinton. Bush has no credibility to pull it off, and that Bush was at least a year late in it’s implementation.
As for Senator Clinton’s IRW vote, there’s not much to explain. She voted for it. The DLC supported the invasion, and she is one of their founding members. And since it took her 5+ years to finally submit to Tim Russert that she wishes she could take that vote back, at a time might I add, that it has become painfully obvious that her previous refusal to do just that may have cost her this election, I wonder who’s being politically expedient here?
Link to
http://mediamatters.org/items/200801140002">Media Matters since the original article no longer is available on google.
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