I've found it interesting that, since last night, Obama's comment about Terri Schiavo seems to be getting a fair amount of play among right wingers (who see Congress's action in that instance as heroic (and his regrets, therefore, as toxic)) and very little play among his supporters. I find that odd because I thought his comment was really quite moving and rather interesting.
He said:
When I first arrived at the Senate, in the Senate that first year, we had a situation surrounding Terri Schiavo. And I remember how we adjourned with a unanimous agreement that eventually allowed Congress to interject itself into that decision-making process of the families. It wasn't something I was comfortable with, but it was not something I stood on the floor and stopped. I think it was a mistake, and I think the American people understood it was a mistake, and as a Constitutional professor I knew better....
The only non-right-wing treatment of this I've seen has been a complaint on some website that he's just castigating himself for something in which the rest of the Senate is equally culpable (and thus not much of an admission of guilt). But I didn't see it that way at all. I felt like he REALLY regrets this, that he takes little comfort in the fact that everyone else was equally culpable, because his standard for himself in such a critical situation is indifferent to what everyone else was doing. He is saying that he, a freshman senator, SHOULD have stood in the way of the rest of Congress undertaking this outrageous interference in a family's private moment of pain, singlehandedly if need be, because that would have been the right thing to do -- both morally and, frankly, legally.
I guess I'm just an easy sell, responding exactly the way I'm supposed to to a manufactured insight. But it really felt genuine to me. I don't know whether he has spoken on this before and this is just par for the course, but I was really floored. Such a sad, dark moment to reach back to -- and to fault himself, at that stage of his legislative career, for a failure of courage and leadership. I was really impressed, and really moved, that this candidate is deadly serious about courage, leadership, and (how unfashionable) the Constitution.