Obama’s Winding War Path
Barrack Obama benefited mightily in the Democratic presidential primary from his consistent stance against the war in Iraq, while Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time parsing about why she voted for the then quite unpopular and seemingly ill-fated campaign.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the real election: things in Iraq started to get better. Now, with violence in Iraq at its lowest level in years, Obama is the one doing the parsing. To be fair, Obama’s primary message on the war was going to change for the general election no matter what. His mantra that we never should have gone into Iraq, we shouldn’t be there now and we should leave immediately may have been music to the ears of the loony left of the Democratic party in a primary, but it was never intended for prime time. That’s why you heard him, especially once the primary seemed to be in the bag, shift to his message of getting out as carefully as we got in. That sentiment (even though it makes absolutely no sense) had the necessary ambiguity to make Americans believe that Obama would push for a resolution that could make everyone feel better about the whole thing. That would likely have been Obama’s message in the general election had things not gone horribly wrong, which is to say right, in Iraq.
The progress in Iraq forces Obama to face tough questions about the glaringly obvious success of the surge, which he opposed and John McCain pushed hard for at his own political peril. Admitting that the surge has worked forces him to admit that McCain was right and he was wrong. Instead, he points to progress like the Anbar Awakening that had started to happen before the surge in order to (not so) subtly insinuate that the surge didn’t really do anything. His resistance to acknowledging the success of the surge just makes him look like a run of the mill politician who can never admit mistakes.
However, the larger point is that the recent success in Iraq has left Obama without a war policy. It’s hard to deny the distasteful idea that the best thing for the Obama campaign would have been continued violence and anarchy in Iraq. John Kerry, who famously voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it, was hurt by his nonsensical Iraq policy. His argument that he would basically do the same thing as Bush in Iraq, but in some ill-defined way he would do it better, more or less doomed his bid for the White House. Now that it looks like troops will be coming home as a result of progress and improved conditions on the ground, Obama’s position is that he too will bring troops home, but he would have done it even if things were still bad. That’s not exactly a winning message. Obama has even said that he would consult with the commanders, but that he wouldn’t really listen to them if they didn’t agree with him that troops had to start coming home immediately.
So, basically, the better things go in Iraq, the worse it will be for the Obama campaign. I know what I’ll be rooting for.
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The more we learn about this empty suit the more his poll numbers go down. Do you think Obama people are starting to get nervous and perplexed as to why he is dropping?
Remember to put air in you tires