[NYTr] War critics question Obama's fervor

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Washington Post - Sep 15, 2007 via rick kissell

War Critics Question Obama's Fervor

Some Say Actions Don't Match Talk

By Perry Bacon Jr.

For antiwar Illinois Democrats, the speech that made them fall in love 
with Barack Obama was not the one he gave in Boston in 2004 at the 
Democratic National Convention, but one two years earlier at a hastily 
organized rally in Chicago on the eve of the congressional vote to 
authorize the Iraq war.

"I don't oppose all wars," Obama, then a state senator, said on Oct. 2, 
2002. ". . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to
is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard
Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this 
administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, 
irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."

This week, Obama quoted his own words in a speech on Iraq that
chastised those who "took the president at his word instead of reading
the intelligence for themselves."

But some antiwar Democrats have raised questions about the depth of 
Obama's opposition, taking aim at one of the signature arguments for
his candidacy -- that he is the only leading Democratic candidate who 
opposed the war from the beginning.

They say that while Obama did argue against the war as a Senate 
candidate, he tempered his rhetoric and his opposition once he arrived 
in the Capitol, rejecting timetables for withdrawal and backing war 
funding bills. He returned to a sharper position, they say, when he 
started running for president.

"So many politicians were afraid" to oppose the war, "so he gets credit 
for that," said Jim Ginsburg, a Chicago Democratic activist. He backed 
Obama when he ran for the Senate in 2004 but says Al Gore is his 
preferred candidate for president.

"Some of his actions and speeches once he got in the Senate did not 
match his rhetoric," Ginsburg, the son of Supreme Court Justice Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg, said of Obama. "He started making very mealy-mouthed 
comments and voted to authorize funding for the war. Once he started 
seeing how angry Democrats were, his rhetoric has turned to where it
was in the 2004 campaign."

Obama's early opposition to the war, his advisers say, presents a 
telling contrast with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and fits 
neatly into the candidate's larger argument that experience in 
Washington is not important.

At the same time, its political benefit has been limited: Polls of 
Democratic voters show that those who favor immediate withdrawal from 
Iraq and who say the war is the top issue favor Clinton, as do
Democrats overall. And some in the party's Net roots -- the bloggers
and online activists who have grown in influence and were also early
critics of the war -- argue that former senator John Edwards of North
Carolina has been more outspoken in his opposition in the past two
years.

"It's great [Obama] had good judgment," said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, 
who runs the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, but he added: "There's no 
clarity of message." Moulitsas said that Obama should have firmly come 
out against any bill that offers funding for the war without a
timetable for withdrawal, as Edwards has.

"Barack Obama was against the war from Day One and has consistently 
fought to end it in the quickest, most responsible way possible," 
responded Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "Friends can disagree, but Obama 
has been one of the steadiest antiwar voices in Washington since he got 
there."

In a speech Wednesday, Obama offered his most detailed plan yet for 
getting troops out of Iraq, calling for the withdrawal of at least one 
of the 20 brigades (each made up of about 3,500 soldiers) in Iraq every 
month starting now, with all combat troops out by the end of next year. 
And even among the most antiwar audiences, Obama still has many
supporters.

"He's been there from the very beginning," said Tom Andrews, the 
national director of a group called Win Without War.

That beginning dates to the fall of 2002, when a group of 15 liberal 
activists in Chicago, furious about the Bush administration's
intentions in Iraq, were organizing a rally to show opposition.

They were not sure who would show up, even in liberal Chicago, as many 
leading Democrats all over the country were strongly backing President 
Bush's war effort. Along with inviting a group of clergymen and more 
senior political figures in the city, such as Jesse L. Jackson, one of 
the activists, Bettylu Saltzman, called Obama.

Saltzman said she had not even heard Obama's position on the war but 
thought that, as one of the more liberal members of the state Senate,
he would be against it. Dan Shomon, a political strategist who was
advising Obama at the time, said Obama told him he was concerned he
would be perceived as a pacifist if he attended the rally. Shomon told
Obama it was important to speak on a core issue, particularly with
longtime allies such as Saltzman organizing the event.

At the rally, Obama spoke after Jackson, and a story in the next day's 
/Chicago Tribune/ did not even mention his appearance. But the fiery 
speech, much different from the unifying address he would give almost 
two years later at the Democratic convention, impressed many of the 
antiwar activists, who would become important backers of Obama's 
underdog Senate campaign.

"Bush's ratings were at an all-time high," said Marilyn Katz, another 
organizer of the rally, who is now one of the top fundraisers for 
Obama's 2008 campaign. But Obama "was willing to stand up and stake out 
a leadership position."

Obama has cited the speech as evidence of his leadership on difficult 
issues. "When I opposed this war before it began in 2002, I was about
to run for the United States Senate, and I knew it wasn't the
politically popular position," he told a crowd in Iowa in July. "But I
believed then and still do that being a leader means that you'd better
do what's right and leave the politics aside."

Elizabeth Edwards, whose husband has strong support among bloggers and 
in the antiwar movement despite having voted for the war when he was in 
the Senate, has questioned that notion. She told /The Progressive/ 
magazine this summer that Obama is behaving in a "holier than thou" way 
on the war, arguing that his 2002 speech was "likely to be 
extraordinarily popular in his home district."

Ginsburg, the Chicago activist, said that "Barack was playing to a 
friendly crowd" and added: "Especially in Chicago, where all the 
Democrats are, that was not a particularly unpopular position at the
time."

When the war started going badly, Obama continued to criticize it and 
attacked others in the Senate primary for not opposing it earlier. "I
am the only candidate in this race to have publicly opposed the war in
Iraq before it started," he said in February 2004.

But once he arrived in the Senate, after winning the primary and easily 
dispatching his Republican opponent, Obama did not emerge as a key
voice on the war.

Days after Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) gave a teary speech in November 
2005 calling for the immediate pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, Obama 
called for a phased reduction in troops but emphasized that he was 
against a timetable for withdrawal.

"I'm not a military man," he told the Chicago Tribune. "I'm not running 
the war in Iraq."

In 2005 and 2006, Obama backed several bills that funded the Iraq war. 
In July 2006, when Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry (Mass.) and Russell 
Feingold (Wis.) pushed for a bill that would set a timetable to remove 
combat troops from Iraq by July 31, 2007, Obama, like Clinton, voted no.

Six months later, as his campaign got underway, Obama laid out a
precise timetable for completing the withdrawal of combat troops. His
aides say he took that position as he became more concerned with the
situation in Iraq, particularly when the president proposed an increase
in troops. Feingold said in June of his party's field of candidates:
"Just about every one of them in the past mouthed that timelines are a
bad idea -- all of that was just false, and now they are voting for
them."

In November, Obama suggested that his position on Iraq was similar to 
Clinton's.

"It's not clear to me what differences we've had since I've been in the 
Senate," Obama told /The New Yorker/ magazine. "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. . . . 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."

Obama, like Clinton, now says the situation in Iraq is untenable and 
troops must start returning home as soon as possible, but he adds that 
withdrawal will take more than a year.

But unlike Clinton, he is not blaming Bush alone for the war.

"You know, I welcome all of the folks who have changed their position
on the war," Obama said in Iowa on Wednesday. ". . . But if we have
learned anything from Iraq, it is that the judgment that matters most
is the judgment that is made first."