Obama Turns Lieberman-Kyl Into A Weapon, Part II

Here's part one.

No longer can we write that Barack Obama is unwilling to make a frontal, sustained, critical argument against the election of Hillary Clinton, an argument that ties her 2002 Iraq vote to a current issue, unfolding in real time.

"Senator Clinton is the only Democratic candidate for president who supports this amendment,” Obama said in Des Moines today, according to excerpts of his speech provided by his campaign.

“She said, like she did five years ago, that it is a way to support diplomacy. I disagree. We all know that Iran poses a threat. We do need to mount international pressure to stop Iran’s nuclear program. We do need to tighten sanctions on the Iranian regime – particularly on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which supports terrorism. But this must be done separately from any saber-rattling about checking Iranian influence with our military presence in Iraq.”

“I don’t want to give this President any excuse, or any opening for war." “Because as we learned with the authorization of the Iraq War – when you give this President a blank check, you can’t be surprised when he cashes it.”

“Senator Clinton makes a different argument,” Obama said. “She says that she wasn’t really voting for war back in 2002, she was voting for more inspections, or she was voting for more diplomacy. But all of us know what was being debated in the Congress in the fall of 2002. We didn’t need to authorize a war in order to have United Nations weapons inspections. No one thought Congress was debating whether or not to conduct diplomacy. The headlines on October 12, 2002 did not read: ‘Congress authorizes diplomacy with Iraq’ – the headlines on October 12, 2002 read ‘Congress backs war.’”

The biggest push-back: Obama is sincere about this, it's clear -- but why didn't he say it when the amendment came up? If the amendment was so dangerous, why wasn't he in the Senate leading the fight against it? Why did he skip the vote?

Part III -- Later today, Obama's objections to Lieberman-Kyl, in depth.

Comments

Why does this question keep coming up? Those of you who call yourselves "political analyst" know full well why he wasn't there to vote on the Iran amendment. Harry Reid called for the amendment to be voted that day(after saying that he would set the date for another time), why he did this only him and god knows. Please report everything if you are going to report anything, it really gets frustrating. May God Bless You.

Posted by Monique | October 12, 2007 2:23 PM

THANK YOU MONIQUE! I COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN IT ANY BETTER! GO BARACK! OBAMA 08!

Posted by S4WATSON | October 12, 2007 3:25 PM

Marc,

I read almost all of your posts and find you to be one of the few solid sources of information out there. The vast majority of the time I find that you get the story right, and I commend you for that.

For that reason, I believe that your rhetorical questions at the end of this post are not out of any intentional omission. Senator Reid rescheduled the vote at the last minute after indicating he wouldn't hold the vote until the following week. Obama was on the campaign trail, having been told the vote would be the following week.

That's why he wasn't able to fight against the resolution on the floor of the Senate. Since it is a "sense of the senate," non-binding resolution, it is intended to gauge support for the ideas being put forward in the resolution by getting the Senators on record. Since Obama went on record opposing the resolution immediately after its passage, that has the same effect.

The intent of the resolution is for those who wish to keep our soldiers in Iraq indefinitely to point back to this down the road and say "well, Iran's still a problem, and you said in this resolution that we'd stick around until Iran wasn't a problem any more, so if you want us out, you're a hypocrite." Clearly, this won't be a problem for Obama.

Please update your post to acknowledge the reason Obama was not present. As I mentioned, I read your posts constantly, and this is the first time I can remember being disappointed, so thanks for all your great reporting. Keep it up.

Posted by Charlie | October 12, 2007 5:34 PM