Legitimate questions of Obama’s judgment? How Right You Are, Mr. Ambassador.

What are the top three reasons someone might doubt Senator Obama's judgment? I know what mine are. What are yours?

Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s op-ed entitled “Legitimate questions of judgment, experience” in the May 4 “News & Observer” suggests that we take a closer look at Senator Obama’s claims to superior judgment. Well, at least one on-line community of passionately anti-Iraq war progressives has already thoroughly explored that matter. That's us, at the Clark Community Network (CCN). As a result of much research and many debates, most of us (although not all of us) are convinced that Senator Obama’s claim to superior judgment is not supported by the facts.

In this diary, and in the comments others will post in response, I hope we can set forth the most salient facts which reflect upon Senator Obama’s judgment. It is critically important that the Democratic Party and the American people know the facts regarding Senator Obama’s oft-repeated claims to his supposed superior judgment.

But before I kick off this fact-quest by describing the top three reasons I have doubts about Senator Obama's Judgment, I want to point out that before General Clark announced last September that he would not be running for President, many CCN regulars, myself included, thought that Senator Obama would be a fine VP candidate on a 2008 Clark-Obama ticket. And while a relative few of us, again - myself included, also felt that Hillary Clinton could be a great President, I think many more of us doubted that she could be elected. We were then and still are very aware of all the negatives the right-wing noise machine can and undoubtedly will throw at her when she becomes the nominee of the Democratic Party.

I also want to specifically assure those relative newcomers to politics who currently support Senator Obama that I think I have some understanding and appreciation of what it is like to feel the way that I think many of you do about your candidate. Furthermore, I want to state that I think Governor Dean’s instincts may be correct, and that the long-term interests of the Democratic Party may be best served if one of our two remaining candidates were to withdraw in June.

The bad news for Obama supporters is that I am quite certain that if any such withdrawing is to be done, it must be done by Senator Obama. In my view, the current political landscape is now revealing that he most likely cannot reach the necessary coalition to win the Presidency in 2008. The good news is that I also am certain that Hillary does have the necessary coalition to win in 2008; and that Senator Obama has the capability to dispel any and all concerns and questions about his judgment between now and the end of Hillary’s second term as POTUS. In other words, I have little doubt that, if he plays his political cards right, Barack Obama can be welcomed to the Presidency by out-going President Clinton in 2017.

OK, with all those preliminaries concluded, here are the top three reasons I doubt Senator Obama’s oft repeated claims to superior judgment:

1. Iraq - Everyone knows he made a speech in 2002, but who knows what he said, and what he did?

Senator Obama’s claim of superior judgment on this matter stems from the fact that he did make a speech in 2002 in which he said that he was “opposed to dumb wars” including the then still being debated idea of invading Iraq. However, he subsequently did nothing to oppose the war for nearly 3 whole years. Nonetheless, during his Presidential campaign, Senator Obama has so embellished the importance of that one speech that I am appalled that most of the blogosphere hasn’t yet called him on hyping it to an extremely excessive degree.

Furthermore, Senator Obama has not only embellished the importance of that one speech, he has also distorted the historical record of the very minor differences between himself and Hillary regarding the war in Iraq. In early March, I was at a number of political events including one for Senator Obama in Wyoming. His large crowd of mostly college-age admirers gave him the loudest applause when he spoke of his great good judgment in opposing the war in Iraq, while, he claimed, in complete contrast, Senator Clinton had been for it.

This is a major distortion first of all because, as Ambassador Wilson says, Senator Clinton and other Democrats who voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002 were not voting for war, they were instead voting to give President Bush the credible ability to threaten the use of force to ensure that UN inspectors could return and complete their work in Iraq. Ironically, giving Bush that authority sounds just like what Obama supported in his October 2002 “dumb wars” speech when he said:

You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work.

Moreover, when he was running for the US Senate in 2004, he said he might have voted for the Iraq War Resolution if he had been a US Senator in 2002!

Troubling as that is, Senator Obama's hypocritical claim that Hillary was for the war in 2002 when her actual position was nearly the same as his is only half of the distortion he has used to portray himself as having superior judgment. As I first began to suspect in Wyoming, the rest, in a way, is even more troubling for it involves a truly audacious distortion of the historical record.

To loud cheers in Wyoming, just as he had done in many other states, Senator Obama claimed that his great good judgment was demonstrated by the fact that he was opposed to the war in 2002, and in 2003, and in 2004, and in 2005, etc, and that he was opposed to it now. However, there’s no evidence whatsoever to support his claim that he was opposed to the war in 2003 and 2004, and precious little evidence to suggest that he truly opposed it in 2005 until November, after Congressman Jack Murtha demanded that President Bush re-deploy our troops out of Iraq!

2. Health Care - The main beneficiaries of his plan will be the health insurance companies.

In speech after speech, as well as in his grossly misleading "Harry and Louise" ads that distort Hillary's brilliant health care plan, Senator Obama has promised to slice $2500 off the annual health insurance premiums paid by the average American family. Unfortunately, his health care plan will do nothing of the sort because, due to bad judgment on his part it relies entirely on health insurance companies to regulate themselves, while it rather vaguely promises that the use of better information technology, better disease prevention, and more health promotion will decrease health care costs.

I have news for Senator Obama. For all practical purposes, the health insurance companies already regulate themselves, and how's that working for us? Moreover, as wonderful as it is to prevent diseases and promote healthy living, the primary costs saved will become health insurance company profits and/or costs (e.g. Executive compensation). In fact, as our health insurance system is currently so stupidly organized, Medicare ends up paying the majority of the lifetime costs of most people at the end of their lives; and, as a consequence, the taxpayers see no cost-savings whatsoever from disease prevention and health promotion.

Senator Obama also promises that he will implement his health care plan by the end of his first term. First, he wants to think about it and discuss it with everyone in the open and on CSPAN for four years. He's not kidding. He says this over and over. His youthful and well-healed supporters think that's a fine idea, I guess. But, personally, I think that's a completely unacceptable timetable which reflects his failure to care enough about those who are without health insurance, and those who are already paying far too much for health insurance and receiving too little help from their health insurance companies. Who can possibly think that it's good judgment to let our current health care system continue as is for four more years? Barrack Obama apparently thinks that's a good idea.

3. Housing in Chicago – Obama’s District contains many unlivable structures owned by Tony Rezko.

I'll get to the part about how his Rezko association reveals Obama's bad judgment shortly, but first I want to mention that I first saw this story over at No Quarter. The fact that Community Organizer Obama was too busy running to become State Senator Obama and US Senator Obama to notice what was happening in his district made my blood boil. First, because I've actually lived in some pretty terrible housing, although none as bad as the ones Senator Obama's great good friend and employer Tony Rezko failed to renovate per the terms of the Federal contracts he was awarded. Second, because my own father was born there in Chicago, in that district, at a time when most of the poor people there could reasonably expect their local political leaders to know what was going on in the neighborhood. Dad passed away almost 45 years ago; but if he were alive today, I can just imagine how disgusted he would be that a Chicago south-side politician as inept and clueless as Barack Obama was anywhere close to winning the Democratic nomination to become the next President of the United States.

So far, I haven't seen the media making much of a deal about this. However, for a while, right after Hillary brought up Tony Rezko in one of those debates, some of them pursued a related story about Senator Obama's "boneheaded deal" that enabled him to acquire a nice property with some extra help from some guy named Tony Rezko that Senator Obama at first said he hardly knew. But, for some reason, the whole story hasn't ever made it far outside of Chicago. If I weren't such a trusting person, I might think that some of Obama's principle supporters in Chicago were pulling some strings. I've heard that occasionally happens in politics.

I guess I have to finally say why this Rezko association reveals Obama's bad judgment. First of all, it looks like Obama trusted Tony Rezko in more ways than one, when he instead ought to have been highly critical of him for failing to fix up those apartment buildings. That reveals Senator Obama to be a fairly bad judge of character - even when the person involved isn't a Preacher. Second, it shouldn't take a genius to connect the dots between Senator Obama's cluelessness regarding the plights of the people in those apartment buildings, and his cluelessness regarding the people who are now losing their homes because of the mortgage crisis. If he had any sort of good judgment as well as an instinctively compassionate nature, he would be seeking to solve the latter problem before those people find it necessary to lose themselves in what I'll call "Rezko Specials" (unlivable apartment buildings) somewhere. But he's not doing that. He's far too busy running for President.

Conclusion

OK, so now you know what my top three reasons are for doubting Senator Obama's judgment. What are yours?

Saddam never would have complied with the inspectors w/o the resolution. Those pricey Samoud's were all flattened as a result and the access that was given to the inspectors was unprecendented. I look forward to the rest of your series. Thanks.

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excerpted from Drinking the koolaid by Patrick Lang

The Al Samoud, a massive missile seven meters long weighing two tons with its warhead, was being destroyed, without the slightest obstruction or even complaint from the Iraqis. Major Corrine Heraud, a French woman who served as the chief weapons inspector for UNMOVIC in this operation and who had also served from 1996 with UNSCOM, says that the level of cooperation from the Iraqis was unprecedented, something that she never would have expected and did not encounter during the 1996-98 inspections. Each missile cost more than $1 million, estimates Maj. Heraud, who also cautions that this would be equivalent to a much higher amount in Western dollars, considering the difficulty that Iraq encountered in buying materials and parts, due to the U.N. sanctions. Yet, to President Bush, the destruction of the Al Samoud, a missile often mistaken in photographs for the better-known SCUD missile, was meaningless. The missile destruction, said Bush, was a "campaign of deception." For the U.N. inspectors, Bush's words were a shock. "We didn't know what to make of this," an UNMOVIC official said.

"Blix came down hard on the Iraqis, and we actually were in the process of destroying all these Al Samoud missiles," says Greg Thielman, the former head of the WMD section of INR. "As soon as the Iraqis agreed to do that, I sighed a big sigh of relief. I thought, the U.N. inspectors are working; we've stared Saddam down; we've forced him to do what he desperately didn't want to do, in that area of activity that was of most concern to us." Thielman believes that the Al Samoud incident shows that the administration was so intent on war that this compliance with the inspections "made no difference."

But it was after the next presentation, by IAEA chairman Mohammed ElBaradei, that "all hell broke loose" in Washington. ElBaradei, in his statement, sank the U.S. intelligence community's prestigious NIE, President Bush's State of the Union address, and Colin Powell's February 5 address to the U.N. Security Council with one blow. ElBaradei was calm in what he had to say: "Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents, which form the basis for reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are, in fact, not authentic." The Niger yellowcake documents were forgeries. Then, ElBaradei told the press that an IAEA staff member had, in fact, used the common search engine Google to determine, within hours, that the Niger documents, which had been passed on to the U.S. embassy in Rome through an anonymous source, were fakes! Members of Congress then began to grumble. In light of the contradictions, a bill was introduced demanding that the administration disclose the intelligence reports that were the basis for the statements made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell about the Iraqi WMD threat. It was still locked in committee when the war began. (Emphasis mine.)

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants."

Gen. Omar Bradley

time,....." Hillary was correct in figuring passage of the IWR would enable Bush to fool Saddam into letting the inspectors return, etc.

And, yes, the IWR threat worked brilliantly, as Hillary hoped that it would. We not only got the Inspectors back in, we were able to destroy those missiles. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure we also got copies of virtually all Iraqi documents pertinent to WMD.

But Bush went ahead, displayed bad judgment, fooled most of Congress and most of the American people and invaded Iraq needlessly anyway. Now Barack Obama has such poor judgment that he blames Hillary and (by implication) all the other Dems who voted for the IWR.

Fortunately, on this ship, a great many of us will no more easily be mislead by Barack Obama than we were by George W. Bush.

Nick Kelly

Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.

that talks about "change" and "bringing everyone together" without explaining what such ideas mean
Number Two: Constant lying or twisting the facts about his background and ideas
Number Three: Absolute lack of any special experience or knowledge that would indicate he should be elected President

most people who understand how the world really works. Since that's the case for most voters, I have to agree that this approach shows bad judgment (over the full election cycle). However, it does appeal to the idealistic, particularly those idealists who are privileged. Hence -> a good portion of his base, as well as his success in caucuses. So, in terms of winning Democratic delegates, it seems to be fairly good judgment, so far.

I agree that he has twisted many facts. That's dangerous for a politician, and will doubtless be used against him if he runs against John McCain. Which of O's many twists do you think would hurt him most in such a case?

Yes, and it does seem very risky for him to say that he knows he is young and lacks experience but decided to run because of "the fierce urgency of now!" Still, that has appealed to the youth vote, as well as African Americans and idealists, and it has gotten him quite close to the nomination. However, I don't see that theme playing so well with most other sections of the electorate. You are right. He will need experience or some other impressive credential (like being a war hero) to win in November. He could have waited eight years and accumulated the necessary experience. But he didn't. Driven by hubris, he once again reveals bad judgment.

Nick Kelly

Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.

because the whole scandal has become so well known among the populace. Who could possibly believe he didn't know what this man thinks? It brands him as a man of poor judgment at best and a white-hater at worst. And all the things Wright said at the press club will keep filtering out to people who haven't heard them yet, growing like a mass of kudzu to choke BO's campaign.

Lack of judgment:
1. Marrying Michelle.
2. Becoming part of the Chicago gang in order to get elected to the IL Senate - and then allowing them to do his work.
3. Running for prez as a truly inexperienced neophyte politician with no history of major (or minor) accomplishments.
4. When caught in a lie, he keeps on lying, thus making it worse.
5. Playing the race card against the Clintons, thus perpetuating any race problems that may or may not exist in this country.

This could go on all day.

He's simply not fit to be prez.

We're electing the President of the United States, not some g.d. prom king.

Perhaps Senator Obama will look back on this contest one day and realize just how true that old saw is. Michelle, Reverend Wright, Tony Rezko and the rest of the Chicago gang, and even the network of anybody but Hillary Democrats who urged him to run prematurely. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Again, poor choices - the result of bad judgment.

It was appalling that he participated in that effort to paint the Clintons as racists. If that's any example of how he's going to unite the party and thence the country, prepare to 'get bitter and cling to your guns'. His smearing of the Clintons is not only morally reprehensible, it's downright divisive. Abraham Lincoln must be rolling over in his grave. I sincerely hope the following is not the case; but when historians look back on what may happen outside the Convention in Denver next August, or even in other parts of the country in that very hot season, this playing of the race card may be remembered as the most tragic example of Obama's ambition affecting his judgment with terrible unintended consequences.

Nick Kelly

Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.

And, being the politician that BO is, I have no doubt in my own mind that he thought this was a super-good move. When I first heard Michelle, she came across as a beautiful, well-bred, educated woman--a very smart pick for an ambitious black politician. And-- let's be bluntly honest here--she's not white or too light-skinned. Then, I heard her introduce her husband as "my baby daddy." How could she pander to her audience like that, I wondered! Well, some of her subsequent statements have made that ghettoish phrase sound mild. Now, she often has a hard expression on her face, and photos emerge of her utterly scowling. I, for one, would not vote for BO simply because I wouldn't want her as first lady. I know that sounds trite and even silly, and I would have never thought I could feel that way. (But, I have a dozen other reasons not to vote for him!)

candidate on the basis of qualities they want to see in a First Lady. When it became clear that John Kerry was likely to win the nomination in 2004, my sister said that George Bush would win again for certain. When I asked her what it was about Senator Kerry that made her so certain, she said it was his wife.

Bush won the majority of women in 2004. Perhaps Senator Kerry's marital judgment contributed to his narrow defeat in Ohio, where my sister and I were raised.

So, no, briarhopper, what you are saying does not sound trite or silly. It sounds real.

Nick Kelly

Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.

I don't have the links for any of these, but I've seen them on the GD here, so some enterprising CCN'r might want to find some links to support

My Three Reasons on Obama's Judgement

3. Supporting Charter Schools: Naomi Klein had a great article in Harper's a few months back describing how, after Katrina, the Shock Doctriners aimed their "free market" guns on the New Orleans school system, to the point that it's now basically a caste system of Haves in the charter schools and the Have-Nots in a pretty much severely cash-strapped, underfunded public school system. Obama has said he would be open to expanding the charter school system. Not a good idea, imo.

2. Positions on Free Trade: Last week there were several articles on the CCN GD pointing to Obama's tightness with all these "Chicago School of Economics" advisors, the flat-earther, free-trader, pro-business/anti-worker Freidman followers. Many books have been written on how bad the Freidman "Free Trade" economic system has been wherever it has been tried. Also another bad idea. Following this economic plan MORE is exactly the CHANGE we DON'T NEED, imo.

1. Working "across the aisle": Well, it's easy to work with the other side when you embrace their policies (like the ones I just mentioned and even privatizing SS!). To me that is not negotiation. That is CAPITULATION. That's not leading, that's FOLLOWING, IMHO.

If you can find any references (the Klein article may be on Harper's but requires a log-in), please post below.

Thanks in advance!

_{McCain's Free Ride}
www.mccainsfreeride.com

from ontheissues.org

http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Barack_Obama_Education.htm

Q: Name an issue where you've been willing to stand up against your party.

A: We had a roundtable about what we need to do with the schools. I've consistently said, we need to support charter schools. I think it is important to experiment, by looking at how we can reward excellence in the classroom.

Q: Have teacher's unions been an impediment to that kind of reform?

A: They haven't been thrilled with me talking about these kinds of issues. And my sister is a teacher, so I am a strong support of teachers, but I'm not going to be bound by just a certain way of talking about these things, in order for us to move forward on behalf of our kids. And I think a lot of teachers want to talk about how to continually improve performance. That's not a conservative issue or liberal issue. If you're a progressive, you've got to be worried about how the federal government is spending its revenue, because we don't have enough money to spend on things like early childhood education that are so important.

Source: 2008 Politico pre-Potomac Primary interview Feb 11, 2008
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008_Politico.htm

Naomi Klein explains...

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, schools were getting ready to reopen for fall. More than half the city’s students would be attending newly minted charter schools, where they would enjoy small classes, well-trained teachers, and refurbished libraries, thanks to special state and foundation funding pouring into what the New York Times has described as “the nation’s preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools.” But charters are only for the students who are admitted to the system—an educational Green Zone. The rest of New Orleans’s public-school students—many of them with special emotional and physical needs, almost all of them African American—are dumped into the pre-Katrina system: no extra money, overcrowded classrooms, more guards than teachers. An educational Red Zone.

http://www.democruptcy.com/disaster-capitalism/

_{McCain's Free Ride}
www.mccainsfreeride.com

I've often heard that BO's "Big Speech" that he touts as evidence of his oh-so-fine judgment has been removed from his website, etc. Having spared myself from ever going there, I set off to find it and voila! Here it is. I can assume that this is the actual speech, given where it's posted.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19440.htm

However, it is still also available at O's website at the very bottom of a long list of links to his speeches posted at: http://www.barackobama.com/speeches/index.php

That's part of the reason I'm so appalled that no biggies in the blogosphere have bothered to examine what he actually said in that speech, and what he did to follow up. It's fairly easy to do. I did so, myself, and blogged about it in a diary entitled "The Audacity of Barack Obama". Hillary, very sensibly suggested that the media take a look at the same question:

The address in question was the one he gave in early October 2002 opposing an American invasion of Iraq. Clinton and her aides long have chafed over the mileage he has gotten from it, given the difference in their stature at the time.

He was an obscure state senator in Illinois, representing a district in Chicago with a strong antiwar constituency. She was a high-profile U.S. senator from New York, which suffered the most grievous losses on 9/11. He did not face a vote on the Iraq issue. She did….

"I think it is fair to ask questions about, 'Well, what did you do after the speech was over?' And when he became a (U.S.) senator, he didn't go to the floor of the Senate to condemn the war in Iraq for 18 months. He didn't introduce legislation against the war in Iraq. He voted against timelines and deadlines initially," she (Senator Clinton) said.

But, so far as I know, no one in the media has yet bothered to either ask those questions, or do the research. So far, O's audacious gambit has paid off, because many of his followers think he has been telling them the whole truth concerning his great anti-dumb-wars judgment.

Nick Kelly

Wes Clark could still secure America as a national security candidate.

for the clarification, Nick. I'd read several bloggers' laments on various sites that the speech had been "disappeared" for some reason. I'm fully aware of the fact that he didn't do diddlysquat(sp?) as follow-up. Having just read the speech, I must say it strikes me as pretty much run-of-the-mill. Is "dumb war" the best he could do? Ha! I came of political age during the anti-Vietnam war protests and heard INCREDIBLE speeches.