Today Lanny Davis was on Morning Joe pointing out that in 2004 Senator Obama, when asked in 2004 how he would have voted on the resolution, said "I don't know." The host thought that was a convincing point and asked why the Clinton campaign had not been making that point sooner. To which Lanny Davis replied that they had made that exact case but the press got all sidetracked because of the use of the word fairytale.
Here is video of Bill Clinton mentioning exactly that:
And for the record, here is the same host that Lanny Davis talked with today, Joe Scarborough, lambasting Donna Brazile for the fairy tale comment and saying that Bill Clinton's criticism was fair but failing to actually address whether Obama's claim to superior judgment was questionable:
I believe that Lanny Davis was right that the legitimate criticism got lost because of all the talk over racism. I did happen to trip across a piece in the New Republic by Sean Wilentz that detailed how the Obama campaign fanned the flames of racism. (link)
So, you might ask, "what did the Clinton camp do wrong according to you?" Isn't this just blaming poor media coverage and isn't this really failing to take into account the shortcomings of the Clinton campaign and the developing conventional wisdom that Mark Penn is completely incompetent? To all of that, my simple answer is that I think the Clinton campaign could have gone a different direction and might still be able to do so.
I think the Clinton campaign should have emphasized something else that Bill alluded to when he made the fairy tale comment, which is that Barack Obama seems to have started running for President within a year of taking office. And he should also have pointed out that Barack himself said that he was too inexperienced to run on a national ticket in 2008:
Although it might not be quite true that Senator Obama started running for national office within a year of taking office in January 2005, it is true that he said in November 2004 that if he wanted to run for President in 2008 he would have to start running right away before serving even a day in the Senate. (link) It is also true that Senator Obama has only been officially talking about running for President since October of 2006, after being shown a videotape from an earlier appearance on the program where he said he would serve out his six-year term in the Senate and not run for president before then. At the time the New York Times said that his complete lack of foreign policy experience would be an issue(link):
Until now Mr. Obama and his associates said he would put off any White House run until after he had gained the experience in government that comes from six years in Washington. As it is, they said, if he ran for president he would have to overcome the questions over whether someone who had served just two years in the Senate, is 45 years old and has no experience in foreign policy was qualified to serve in the White House.
We all know what strategy that David Axelrod and Obama came up with to get around what Mr. Obama himself had admitted: that he has very little real experience. They decided to use his opposition to the Iraq War as an example of judgment and say that good judgment trumps experience.
And they believed in that strategy so much that they didn't even try to show that Senator Obama was actually gaining experience in world affairs. Mr. Obama himself claimed that since early 2007 he was too busy running for president to hold meetings on his Senate European Subcommittee that has oversight over Afghanistan:
This failure had actually been noticed in the international community and Senator Obama was lambasted for failing to build a relationship with Europe that was essential to so much of foreign policy. A spokesman for Senator Obama responded by first referring to that opposition to the Iraq war(link):
In a statement emphasising his early opposition to the Iraq war – which Mrs Clinton backed initially – and his support for Nato in Afghanistan, a spokesman said: "Barack Obama will be a leader who understands that the security of the US and Europe is shared. As someone who has lived in Indonesia and has family in Kenya, he will also be uniquely able to bridge the divide between the G8 nations and the developing world."
The spokesman said that Mr Obama had held European subcommittee hearings on the nomination of two US ambassadors in the past year when he had been busy with his presidential campaign.
But Steve Clemons, the director of foreign policy at the New American Foundation in Washington, said that such hearings were not the same as convening full meetings on pressing policy issues such as the future of Nato. "Someone who is seeking the presidency should have some facility for the most important anchor in global affairs, which is the transatlantic relationship," he said. "The major threats in the 21st century are changing but what is not changing is the vital necessity of Europe and the US collaborating in meeting those challenges with Europe, for instance, in the lead on dealing with Iran. This is a very disconcerting void in Obama’s profile."
I don't have to point out that since he has been in office Senator Obama has had almost the exact same vote record on the Iraq War, including funding for that war, as Senator Clinton, despite the fact that he clearly said he would never vote for funding because we needed to win against President Bush:
Senator Obama's defenders are quick to point out that he only actually mentioned one funding bill that he opposed unequivocally and to say that the realities of being in office make it really hard to vote against funding the troops. To which I say that if his judgment were really so damn superior he should have known that when he was running for office and making unrealistic promises.
No less than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, perhaps the leading critic of the Iraq War, has pointed out that Senator Obama had no pressure on him when he made his speech against the war and that he found Senator Clinton's actions before the war more palatable than Senator Obama's. (link)
A number of us, like then Illinois state senator Obama, opposed the second Gulf War. My own opposition from the beginning has been well documented. I fought the fight in the arena itself, Washington DC, against a ruthless administration and its supporters while 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. As an obscure but safe provincial political figure, he never was granted access to the distorted intelligence that was used to drive the Congress and the media. When I looked to the left or to the right for support, I never saw the state senator. In fact, I never heard of Barack Obama until he announced his intention to run for the Senate in the 2006 election.
Barack Obama has almost no relevant foreign policy experience, including experience that he should have gained during his time in the Senate while he was too busy campaigning for President to do the necessary work of forging international relationships. His opposition to the Iraq War was weak enough that in 2004 he said he was "not sure" how he would have voted on the AUMF. "Not. Sure." He has run for president after promising that he would not and after admitting that he would be too inexperienced by 2008. But he decided to break that promise and get around the experience problem by playing up his opposition to the Iraq War.
For some people this questionable opposition, coupled with a glaring lack of relevant foreign policy experience, is satisfactory. The question is why?
