Washington Post FactChecker corrects Bill Clinton on Obama and Iraq

maximusveritas

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Tue Jan-08-08 01:06 PM
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Washington Post FactChecker corrects Bill Clinton on Obama and Iraq

Edited on Tue Jan-08-08 01:27 PM by maximusveritas

This is nothing new. Clinton's attack has been debunked many times before this, but I guess he's desperate enough to keep using it. It's especially desperate considering the fact that Clinton was caught earlier this campaign falsely claiming to be against the war in Iraq from the start when he clearly was not.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/obama_and_iraq.html#more

Clinton then expressed surprise that Obama has been allowed to get away with a statement in 2004, "at the Democratic Convention," saying that there was "not much difference" between him and George W. Bush on Iraq. He also quoted Obama as saying that he "did not know" how he would have voted on the now-contentious 2002 Senate resolution authorizing military action in Iraq, had he been in the Senate at the time.

The way Clinton said all this, it sounded as if these statements were part of Obama's big speech to the convention, which marked his introduction to big-time politics. In fact, they are somewhat misleading snippets from newspaper interviews that Obama gave before the convention.

As the keynote speaker, Obama was trying to be loyal to the Democrataic nominees, John Kerry and John Edwards, both of whom had voted in favor of the war authorization resolution, along with Hillary Clinton. In a July 26 interview with the New York Times, a few days before the convention, he reiterated his opposition to the war but declined to criticize Kerry and Edwards, saying he was "not privy to Senate intelligence reports."

He then continued: "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."

(The Clinton campaign left out that important last sentence when it e-mailed reporters with backup material for the inconsistency claim, which was also made by Hillary Clinton in the televised debate Saturday night.)

In an interview the following day with the Chicago Tribune (July 27,2004), Obama said that he would have voted "no" on the Senate resolution.

Let me explain it for those who are too slow to understand this:
Obama was being asked to criticize Kerry and Edwards for their votes.

He declined, noting that perhaps hypothetically if he had been in the Senate at the same time as them and seen these intelligence reports, he'd come to the same conclusion they did.

But from his vantage point outside the Senate, the case was not made and if he was given a chance to vote based on that, he'd vote "no" for sure.

So it's misleading to suggest that Obama didn't know how he'd vote. He did. He was just talking about a hypothetical situation in which he was in Kerry and Edwards' shoes.

I realize this involves a couple neurons and might be difficult for some people to understand, but I'm sure if you try hard enough, you'll get it.