Obama Takes Sharper Tone to the Trail

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Obama Takes Sharper Tone to the Trail
By JEFF ZELENY
Published: August 17, 2007

ATLANTIC, Iowa, Aug. 16 — Senator Barack Obama has moved in recent weeks to sharpen his tone noticeably as he fights for the Democratic presidential nomination, increasingly drawing sharp contrasts with his rivals and seeking to turn criticism of his foreign policy credentials into a fresh argument for change.

The recalibration of the campaign is a marked departure from a laid-back tone Mr. Obama often had taken in the first six months of his candidacy. It comes as he is working to persuade voters of his judgment and erase perceptions among party leaders in states like this that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is establishing herself as the front-runner after a series of debates and what some Democrats have viewed as slip-ups by Mr. Obama.

Laying the groundwork for a debate in Iowa on Sunday, and at the start of a three-day bus tour across the state on Thursday, he seized at an opportunity to highlight differences with Mrs. Clinton, a level of engagement he waved off in the past. But the window is narrowing for the most enthusiastic party activists to choose sides, and Mr. Obama is seeking to make a stronger case for himself.

“There is — not just with Senator Clinton, but a lot of my opponents — a premium on reciting the conventional wisdom in Washington,” he said at a news conference before speaking here in southwestern Iowa. “And that’s what passes for experience.”

Barely a week has passed since February when Mr. Obama has not made one — or more — visits to Iowa to introduce himself to voters who will open the presidential nominating contest in January. In hundreds of appearances, perhaps no question has been asked more than whether he has the experience to be president. Mr. Obama raised the issue on his own here Thursday as he sought to push back any concerns, arguing that judgment was more critical than experience....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/us/politics/17obama.html?ref=politics

[Bitwit1234]

1. Doesn't take long for the so called "saints" to become "sinners"

he got republicanification pretty darn quick if you ask me.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Nor does it take long for those who voted for the IWR to blame Bush for their lack of judgment

On April 26 in a debate in Orangeburg, S.C., Clinton was asked to name the “most significant political or professional mistake you have made in the past four years.”

She replied: “Well, I don’t have enough time to tell you all the mistakes I’ve made in the last many years. Certainly the mistakes I made around health care were deeply troubling to me and interfered with our ability to get our message out -- and, you know, believing the president when he said that he would go to the United Nations and put inspectors into Iraq to determine whether they had WMDs.”

Then, in a June 3 debate in Manchester, N.H., Mike Gravel attacked those Democrats who made a “political” rather than a “moral” judgment about authorizing the war.

Hillary responded: “Well, I have said repeatedly that if I had known then what I know now, I never would have voted to give the president authority. And in the last debate, I said that, you know, it was a mistake to trust George Bush that he would do what he told all of us he would do. … Now, I do not think that that is a necessarily wrong judgment at the time. What was wrong is the way this president misused the authority that some of us here gave him. And that has been a tragedy.”

Which is pretty careful parsing. (I wonder where she gets it?)

According to Hillary Clinton, it was a “mistake to trust George Bush.” But Hillary’s vote to authorize the war was not a mistake, because it was not “a necessarily wrong judgment at the time.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0807/5424_Page2.html

[Dawgs]

3. Judgement, not politics, is why I like Obama.

Thanks for the summary.

Hillary voted for Bush's war and refuses to apologize for it, yet Obama's "experience" is what constantly gets used against him. I'll go with Obama's judgement over Hillary's experience any day of the week.

[flpoljunkie]

4. Obama yesterday in Iowa,"After all, the war in Iraq wasn't cooked up by folks in Council Bluffs..."

"After all, the war in Iraq wasn't cooked up by folks in Council Bluffs," said Obama. "It was authorized by politicians in Washington who said they knew better. And if that's what conventional thinking on foreign policy amounts to, conventional thinking has to change."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=3487868