I read most of David Mendell's Obama:From Promise to Power on a long flight* yesterday. There is much to recommend about this book, and I understand that Mendell issued a follow-up tome .
There is much to digest from this bio, such as Obama's relationship w/ Rev. Wright, his becoming a client of Axelrod's, and his ties to the late Paul Simon. The book reminds us that Obama is very much in the Paul Douglas/Adlai III/Simon lineage of IL good govt liberal senators. Even more significantly, however, it gives us an in-depth account of how he came to give the speech on the IWR in 2002 that came to define his presidential candidacy.
*While the country looks big on a map, its size becomes more apparent when one flies round trip from Ft. Lauderdale to Seattle over 4 days.
Mendell is a Chicago Trib reporter who covered Obama extensively. His book asserts that Bettylu Saltzman, a local activist who had worked for Simon, asked Obama to speak at an antiwar rally she was organizing. Saltzman and Axelrod shared common ties w/ Simon, and Obama was trying to draw Axelrod to his campaign. Obama, accordingly, had ample political incentive to make this speech.
The Obama campaign website disputes aspects of Mendell's account. The refutation, it should be noted, is of a Trib story that predated the issuance of Mendell's book. Either way, as this quote shows,it's still a hell of a speech 5 1/2 years later:
I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics
Sadly, that view was not widely shared by the Democratic collegues whom Obama hoped to join 2 years later. The "smart" senators who had their eyes on the WH--Kerry, Edwards, and NY's jr senator--all held radically different views. The money quote from HRC's speech is still an eye-opener years later:
President Bush's speech in Cincinnati and the changes in policy that have come forth since the Administration began broaching this issue some weeks ago have made my vote easier. Even though the resolution before the Senate is not as strong as I would like in requiring the diplomatic route first and placing highest priority on a simple, clear requirement for unlimited inspections, I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible.
Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go way with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections.
HRC must've been one of the few sentient beings in the US in 10/02 who honestly thought that the WH was honestly seeking Congressional approval for a more aggressive diplomatic approach w/ Iraq. The title of SJ Res 45: "A Resolution to Authorize the Use of US Armed Forces Against Iraq" wasn't, apparently, a tip-off. Nor were, apparently, the "mushroom cloud" references, the phony links between Al Queda and Iraq, and the other obvious attempts to manipulate public opinion.
The release of the DSM in 2005 made it painfully clear that HRC's Senate floor speech was hopelessly ill-informed. Three months before HRC voted for the IWR to give the WH additional negotiating strength, the WH had already decided that it would invade. Not once has HRC ever acknowledged this catastrophic error in judgment.
There, are, of course, many other reasons why Obama won. His campaign planned for the post-2/5 contests, while HRC's didn't. His campaign did a much better job of rounding up delegates. His approach was to look out the windshield while HRC's was to look at the rear view mirror in a year when the country was desperately seeking change. None of those issues would've mattered, however, had it not been for these 2 contrasting speeches.
We'll never never really know how much of a role political calculation played in each candidate's decision-making processes in 10/02. We do know, however, that, for whatever reasons, 1 candidate made the correct decision and the other made the incorrect one. Those respective decisions tended to define their entire race.