To paraphrase William Faulkner, the past is never far away because it's really not past -- and the political past is much closer than it appears in the mirror. Consider media-anointed Dem frontrunner Hillary Clinton who should have had the headlines all to herself today after raising all those bucket loads of cash. She took it on the chin courtesy of a roundhouse historical punch from Barack Obama. In a speech noting the fifth anniversary of a speech he gave against the coming war in Iraq, Obama told students at DePaul University in Chicago earlier today in essence: some have experience but I have judgment.
In theory, Obama gave a major foreign policy speech. In reality, it was anything but and it had quite the taser effect to it. Further translation: Hillary blew it when she voted to support the war in 2002 and is too tied up into Washington groupthink to be much of a serious force for change if she wins.
“There is a choice that has emerged in this campaign, one that the American people need to understand. They should ask themselves: who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong,” Obama said. “This is not just a matter of debating the past. It’s about who has the best judgment to make the critical decisions of the future.”
Well, he's not debating the past, per se but he's certainly using it to make a potent jab at a certain candidate's moment of political truth and how she explained (or not) this fateful vote. And Obama isn't talking about John Edwards or Joe Biden.
"Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it? "
Obama has beaten this drum before but never so forcefully or quite so obviously -- and of course he didn't mention any names (no need: this is a political soap opera that keeps on giving). With all the Dems anti-war to lesser or greater degrees, Iraq isn't much of an cutting wedge issue despite the fact that it is the biggest elephant in the room.
Now the HIllary folks have been beating their own drum for months, saying in effect that Obama isn't quite the anti-war Messiah he's cracked up to be -- that's he wasn't really being politically courageous in 2002 (Illinois was solidly anti-war; not that it mattered as Congress or the White House or the Washington pundiburo treated the anit-war contingent as surrender monkeys), that he's had the same voting record as her since he came to the Senate in 2005 and that's he wasn't all that anti-war when he arrived. There are fair points and some are more valid than others but they are distracting and raise more questions -- namely where was Hillary (don't ask, don't tell) during the first two years of the war with all of her experience in Washington? Being politically courageous or not cuts both ways.
When I asked Dante Scala at UNH about the Iraq war issue and how it's playing in the primary he told me he was surprised that so many anti-war Dems were trending to Hillary because of the war vote in 2002 that she would rather bury. "They aren't punishing her," he said about the well-analyzed (imagine the Da Vinci Code) vote.
Obama may not be seeking punishment. I suspect he'd settle for accountability at the polls here.
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