Richard Cohen of the Washington Post relates the value of an Obama candicacy regarding a war in Iraq:
But mostly I want Obama to run because he would come into the race with no baggage on Iraq. Not from him would we hear excuses about how he was misled by the Bush administration into thinking there were weapons of mass destruction there. Obama not only was against the war when he ran for the Senate but he can claim — as could the 21 Democratic senators who voted against the war resolution — that it was possible to accept the “facts” at the time and still see that the war was unnecessary, if not downright stupid. It just makes me wince every time I hear John Kerry or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd or Hillary Clinton say they were misled, fooled, lied to or some other version of seduced and abandoned — otherwise they would have voted the right way. This is disingenuous.
It can be no coincidence that so many of the Democrats who voted to authorize Bush to go to war had the White House on their minds. It can be no coincidence, either, that with the technical exception of Russ Feingold, none of the Democrats who voted against the resolution are presidential hopefuls. Take, for instance, Carl Levin of Michigan. To read his statements from the time (September and October 2002) is to see someone who accepted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but still saw no immediate need for war — especially not without widespread international support. Levin, in retrospect, had it about right. The others (not to mention myself) did not.
In some respects — in the Roman way of cursus honorum — an Obama candidacy would be a joke. He has no executive experience, and I don’t know — neither does he — if he can make a decision. But if he could sharpen the focus of the other candidates about Iraq, if he could somehow disengage the United States from Iraq — if he could, in other words, stop wasting American (and other) lives — then his candidacy would hardly be an insult to the system, as some insist, but a gift.
I, for one, accept.
You know, Russ Feingold could take that place, too, “technically.” “Technically” speaking, Russ Feingold has a lot of legislative experience, including that which reaches across party lines (McCain-Feingold, anyone?) And, “technically” speaking, Senator Feingold has earned an Oath of Office Index value of 100/100, indicating a perfect record in the 109th Congress of support for the U.S. Constitution.
This isn’t to say that Barack Obama would be a bad candidate. Senator Obama has earned an Oath of Office Index value of 67/100, which is pretty good, but not stellar. Barack Obama was right on the war from the beginning, and I agree with Cohen when he says that Obama’s writing on religion begins with the hackneyed popularly-required position and moves the reader to a new position that articulates the necessity of secular-based governance. But Obama is not the only possibility out there. Keep that in mind.
