Clinton, Obama, Iraq.

This is from Ezra Klein of The American Prospect:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=01&year=2008&base_name=clinton_obama_iraq

Just got this e-mail from the Clinton campaign:




On one level, this is true. Barack Obama did not step into the Senate and seek leadership in the anti-war movement. When Elizabeth Edwards said Obama's Senate record showed "a relatively complacent and go-along Senator," she wasn't necessarily wrong.

But on another, it's deeply misleading. It's a "Meet the Press" attack. The issue isn't the issue -- about which Obama was correct -- it's his consistency on the issue. Barack Obama was right on Iraq, and Hillary Clinton was wrong. Obama could have made a couple more speeches, but there really wasn't much he could do to divert the course of the war as a lone Senator. By contrast, there was very much Hillary Clinton, and her husband, could have done to divert the war -- and all it would have taken was exactly what Obama did. A prescient, fiercely oppositional speech during the run-up to the invasion. Nor has Clinton, who routinely promises to end the war once in office, exercised political leadership in the Senate, using either her media power or parliamentary pull to sustain a brave stand against the conflict. Instead, she has spoken of her desire to end it and, in reality, gone along with the cowed, ineffectual approach of the Senate Democrats: Register opposition, vote against bills, eventually pass spending measures that continue the war. I understand that the narrative she's trying to push is that real change takes perpetual work, but she's not been working for this change. That may be because she doesn't believe in this change, but either way.

In fact, this is patently untrue. All "lone senators" have one essential power to exercise-- their individual votes. Senator Obama, despite his rhetoric, has not missed a single opportunity to use his fundamental authority to prolong the war against Iraq. The same is true of Senator Clinton, and former Senator Edwards, for that matter. Folks can dance around this issue all they want, and generate as much spin as they want, but NOT ONE of the front runner dems has EVER done a damned thing to stop the war against Iraq, even though they have explicit authority to act in favor of stopping it.

...although I do agree with you that the IWDEA was a step in the right direction. But in the end all it really proposed was implementing the recommendations of the James Baker Iraq Study Group-- hardly an anti-war recommendation in any shape or form. It explicitly accepts the number of troop occupying Iraq prior to the "surge" and maintains funding for the occupation, and it tacitly accepts the foreign policy objectives of the war. I am not impressed. Opposing the war means working to end it with all possible dispatch, not codifying an alternative means for continuing it.

And Senator Obama has consistently voted to prolong the war every time the Bush administration has asked for the funds to do so, as have the other two front-running dems when they've had the opportunity.

I'm still waiting......