| Description | Two big speeches in two days for Barack Obama. Today, in a big speech on Iraq, he takes some strong shots at both Hillary Clinton and John McCain ("What we need in our next Commander in Chief is not a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality or empty rhetoric about 3 AM phone calls") and argues that we're fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time:
[snip]
There's a lot more in this vein, and the speech was heavily focused on the purely military aspects of the war on terror — too heavily focused for my taste. But there were nods here and there to nonmilitary issues, including this nicely delivered paragraph:
Senator Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush have made the same arguments against my position on diplomacy, as if reading from the same political playbook. They say I'll be penciling the world's dictators on to my social calendar. But just as they are misrepresenting my position, they are mistaken in standing up for a policy of not talking that is not working. What I've said is that we cannot seize opportunities to resolve our problems unless we create them. That is what Kennedy did with Khrushchev; what Nixon did with Mao; what Reagan did with Gorbachev. And that is what I will do as President of the United States.
That last sentence is clever, associating himself with three presidents who are widely admired as toughminded negotiators. It's a neat play, both rhetorically and substantively. |
