Obama Responds
Sun Jan 13, 2008 at 12:32:44 PM PDT
Barack Obama recently responded to the controversy in the African American community regarding Hillary Clinton's comments about Martin Luther King. After the tone of the Democratic primary race has gotten a bit compromised over the past week, and threatened to go in a direction none of us would like to see, Obama's statement helps push us back towards the straightforward yet fair tone we would hope to see in a contentious yet civil campaign:
From a speech accepting the endorsement of Claire McCaskill:
What we saw this morning is why the American people are tired of Washington politicians and the games they play. But Sen. Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement. I haven’t remarked on it, and she I think offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that, but the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.
I have to point out that instead of telling the American people about her positive vision for America, Sen. Clinton spent an hour talking about me and my record in a way that was flat-out wrong. She suggested that I didn’t clearly and unambiguously oppose the war in Iraq when it is absolutely clear and anyone who has followed this knows that I did. I stood up against the war when she was voting for it, at a time when she didn’t read the intelligence reports or give diplomacy a chance. She belittled the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate despite the fact that she stood on the sidelines during that negotiations on that bill.
I have to say that she started this campaign saying that she wanted to make history and lately she has been spending a lot of time rewriting it. I know that in Washington it is acceptable to say or do anything it takes to get elected, but I really don’t think that is the kind of politics that is good for our party, and I don’t think it is good for our country, and I think that the American people will reject it in this election.
What I want to do is spend talking about how we are going to make sure that people who are losing their jobs get work. How are we going to make sure that our young people are going to afford college? How are we going to make sure that the subprime lending crisis does not lead to an all-out recession? How are we going to create the kind of foreign policy that allows us to bring our troops home and makes us safer and goes after a genuine terrorist threat? Those are the issues that we are going to spend time talking about in this campaign and if Sen. Clinton wants to be distracted by the sorts of political point scoring that was evident today then that is going to be her prerogative.
Tags: 2008 Democratic Primary, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions
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