The political world is buzzing over Senator Clinton's recent 3am red phone ad and Barack Obama's lightspeed response ad. Missing from all this buzz is the fact that Senator Obama's ad depends on several carefully crafted lies.
Lie number 1: Foreign Policy Experience doesn't matter
Supporters of Senator Obama will probably respond that what Senator Obama is really saying is that his good judgment is more important than his foreign policy inexperience or Senator Clinton's superior Foreign Policy experience.
While it is true that Senator Obama's current position is that his judgment on the Iraq War trumps Senator Clinton's experience. But that isn't what Senator Obama was saying a short three and a half years ago. Here is Obama after winning his Senate seat in November 2004:
I am a big believer in knowing what you're doing when you apply for a job. And I think that, if I were to seriously condsider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now before having served a day in the Senate. Now there's some people who might be comfortable doing that. But I'm not one of those people.
Here is video of that statement::
Has Senator Obama really changed his mind that much on the the importance of experience or is he now comfortable with his his relative inexperience or running for national office from day one instead of focusing on his Senate duties?
By November of 2006, two years later, Obama went from that to skipping the part about his personal discomfort with not knowing what he was doing and just talking about whether it "made sense" or not (link, audio of entire interview here):
And at that time it was absolutely true that I thought, Well, that doesn’t make any sense—I haven’t been sworn in yet. Now, there’s some, I think, who would argue that it still might not make sense after having only served two years in the U.S. Senate. And that’s something that I very much appreciate. I understand it.
Lie number 2: Obama has carefully dropped references to the fact that he was not actually in the Senate at the time and didn't see the intelligence on Iraq.
This is what one might call a sin of omission. In the same interview where he said that, he was asked about Senator Clinton and had this to say about her war vote:
I think what people might point to is our different assessments of the war in Iraq, although I’m always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence. And, for those who did, it might have led to a different set of choices. So that might be something that sort of is obvious. But, again, we were in different circumstances at that time: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.
I haven't heard him carefully mentioning that part about not seeing the intelligence lately, his latest response ad being a case in point. Now he is saying he has better judgement and almost always skipping the part where he was not in the Senate at the time.
Even a year ago, a piece in the Boston Globe said Obama had "often" added the caveat about having seen the intelligence. Not "always" but "often." That can be a big difference. For example, if you often tell the truth, people won't trust you near as much as if you always tell the truth.
I have been making the argument that for other people it would be considered laughable to claim superior judgement when they didn't even look at the evidence. After being briefed on the NIE, Senator Clinton was suspicious of the intelligence it contained and so went beyond it to reach out to contacts in the international intelligence community. A month after Senator Obama gave the November 2006 interview above, Senator Clinton said that if she knew then what she knows now she would have voted differently. (link) To compare her decision, based on the best intelligence available at the time, with Senator Obama's position on the war is really comparing apples and oranges.
Lie number 3: Opposing the war was politically risky for Senator Obama.
First, it needs to be pointed out that Senator Obama did not develop a national profile of opposition to the Iraq War. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who did have a national profile of opposition to the war and did carry a risk for speaking out, said he was looking for support and he never even heard of Senator Obama until the latter was running for Senate. (link)
Ambassador Wilson also suggested that Senator Obama carried little political risk within Illinois itself:
the senator's opposition came from a far distance and carried no risk, given that he represented in Springfield, Illinois the district encompassing the University of Chicago.
The suggestion that Senator Obama carried little political risk even in Illinois is put forth more strongly from those familiar with the details. When Senator Obama removed his famous speech from his website in, he received tremendous pressures, particularly from the African American community, to return the speech to his website and renew his opposition to the war. In December 2007, Black Agenda Report (h/t eriposte) had this to say about the episode:
When Barack Obama was a state legislator running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2003 opposition to the war in Iraq was extremely popular in African American communities and among the progressive voters he needed in order to win. Brother Obama was on the case, doing what he had to do to sew up that vote early, showing up at local antiwar meetings and rallies, and making speeches like the one opposing "a dumb war" which is now trotted out as evidence of his fervent and prescient antiwar stand.
Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, and by late May... this reporter checked Obama's campaign web site and noted that all the evidence of and references to candidate Obama's prior opposition to the invasion of Iraq had been deleted.
After calls to Obama's campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements.
Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator's June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three "bright line" issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama's response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.
Here is what they said when it first happened (link):
There are definitely multiple voices in Obama's ear right now. On the one hand, there are the DLC/New Democrats, the right wing corporate funded arm of the Democratic Party. Their consistent advice is to shut up and support the president's war at home and abroad, to get away from the concerns of "special interests" like minorities, working Americans, environmentalists and the uninsured, and peel off some not-too-conservative Republican swing votes. Their champion is Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, the most rightwing of the Democratic candidates for President.
On the other hand, there is Barack Obama's Democratic base - African Americans, who don't support the war, and other Democratic voters who don't support President Bush. In fact, according to the Gallup and Zogby polls the most strongly held common issue among those opposed to the president is opposition to the war. Should Obama fail to vigorously attack the party of war and corporate plunder he will lose the opportunity to energize and expand his base. The crusade will be smothered in its crib - the DLC's proven formula for failure.
After pressure from within his base of support, Senator Obama returned the speech to his website. One can argue whether the reason he gave for removing the speech in the first place makes sense. That is not the point. The point is that the Iraq War was opposed so strongly within his base that there was no real political risk in opposing it. In fact the opposite is true: It seems that not strongly opposing the war was politically risky for Senator Obama.
Furthermore, Senator Dick Durbin also opposed the Iraq War, which gave Senator Obama some political cover if he needed it. But the political importance of opposition to the Iraq War is perhaps most apparent in what the Black Agenda Report noted about Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. (link):
Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Chicago), perhaps Obama's most prominent supporter among local elected officials, knows well the power of passion in the political process. Jackson has taken pains to state and restate his opposition to the Bush party's doctrine of "preventive war," both on constitutional and moral grounds, and wastes no opportunity to denounce it as utterly unjustified. Rep. Jackson also has some salient thoughts on the flavor that African American progressive candidates representing the views of their base bring to general elections nationally, or in big states like Illinois.
Conclusion
Mixed opposition to the Iraq War from a candidate who carried little political risk is not brave, contrary to what Senator Obama suggested in his recent ad. Nor is it comparable to the vote of someone who was actually in the Senate at the time and had to vote, something Senator Obama himself once carefully pointed out every time he mentioned this. Given that Senator Obama also once thought he did not have the experience necessary and now claims that his politically expedient judgment is superior to Senator Clinton's experience, his whole position begins to resemble a house of cards, with the whole thing possibly falling if even one of those cards is removed.