"In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.”
All presidential candidates either define themselves through big issues or become defined by them. With his speech today in Clinton, Iowa, and the artful step-by-step build-up to it, Obama has cemented his unique and deserved place in the 2008 presidential campaign: Barack Obama, the anti-war candidate.
Not everybody yet sees (or wants to see) it that way, but he's got it in his hands now. And nobody else is positioned to wrestle that mantle away.
By cementing his stature as the candidate that voters will think of when they increasingly dream of “turning the page” on the Iraq war and ending it, and by accomplishing that with sincerity, Obama is now positioned to embody the surprise narrative of the 2008 campaign: when a nation marches away from war.
More about today’s events, how they came to be, and the momentum coming out of them, plus a poll, at the jump…
The Democratic primaries are going to be a referendum on the war in Iraq. Bush isn’t going to end the war before then, nor are the divided Democrats in Congress going to save the day before the elections. That's as terribly sad as it is terribly so.
Although, to many, efforts to stop the war on the fixed playing field of a narrowly-Democratic US Congress under presidential veto are paramount, the general public, equally or more anti-war in fervor, does not have high expectations of that occuring prior to the next administration. The anti-war public, rather, if the war continues, is looking for the Democratic candidate that can, through the campaign, build the mandate that makes it impossible not to end the war.
It's the anti-war primary: a decisive preliminary to the actual primary voting.
Having been the first, in 2002, among the top tier candidates to speak out against the Iraq war before it started, Obama always had the inside track to become what he now is: the voice that unites and mobilizes American public opinion to sweep out the old and ring in the new in November of 2008, with a clear mandate to end the war in Iraq.
His main challenge has been to gain the Democratic nomination to be able to do so against an institutional establishmentarian frontrunner who is so replete with baggage of an administration from the previous century that she is the de facto incumbent among candidates of both parties in this cycle.
It is no secret that the other Democrats running for president all aspire to be “the one” that the weary majority of Democrats and Independents coalesce around to avert a return to a mediocre past.
The Des Moines Register reports tonight that the Republicans were fixated on Obama’s anti-war speech even as all the other Democratic candidates were furiously yapping away trying to establish them selves as the anti-war candidate:
“Today’s speech just serves to highlight the level of Obama’s inexperience,” Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said about three hours before the speech was made. “Hours ago he heard testimony from the top military commander in Iraq that the increase of US troops is working to bring down violence, yet he chooses to follow his own interpretations.”
Yep. Obama chose “to follow his own interpretations,” not solely independent from the Bush administration’s Save-The-War PR campaign of recent weeks, but also from the constant sniping and provocation by Democratic rivals (and also no small number of pundits and bloggers, including among some of his own supporters) trying to either instruct Obama on what he must say, when he must say it, and how high he must jump, or to insist, if they are candidates, that they are more pregnant against the war than Obama is.
But the public knows (and Democratic primary voters in particular) that most of the candidates are already expecting; it wants to know which will bring the best America into this world without miscarrying by surrendering too much influence to the powers that want to put it, too, in harm’s way. It wants to know which candidate can best generate the mandate in 2008 that will allow him or her to really turn the page. That’s what the “anti-war primary” has been about all along; which of the aspirants really can be the unifying and mobilizing nominee that solidifies and moves public opinion to make the change happen?
Today we got our answer.
The history of recent days has been fascinating to watch as one after another each of Obama’s primary rivals sought to portray themselves as the anti-war standard bearer.
Their messages were muddied, though, before public opinion, choosing awkwardly and inartfully to compete with the Bush and Petreaus circus, the Osama bin Laden video and the September 11 memorial date. In the midst of the cross-fire of pandering and politics, the calls grew louder: Stand up, Obama! Step up to the plate! Do it NOW, dammit! Do it now or you will lose me!
Even before he gave his speech today, some rivals were attacking it: “Senator Obama has a gift for soaring rhetoric, but, on this critical issue, we need to know the substance of his position with specificity,” Chris Dodd said... before Obama spoke.
But Obama waited until the din receded, when the stadium was quiet enough to hit the first key, to begin the symphony. And by walking to the rhythm of his own heart and mind, instead of offering a knee-jerk politician's response to the noise, he succeeded in getting everyone to hush up for a moment and listen to his reasoning.
Early this morning, Obama went on national television, on The Today Show, in anticipation of his speech, and easily dismissed with the cranky host’s whiney and unprepared questions:
The crescendo of that Today Show mini-concert was awesome:
“The main thing though, David, is this: We can’t continue on the same course that we’re on and expect a different outcome. This has now been five years in which the president has pursued a course in Iraq that is not working. And the only thing that is going to trigger different behavior from the Iraqi government is a recognition that we’re not going to have permanent bases there, we’re not going to be there forever, and that’s I think what the American people are looking for now.”
His speech drew a packed hall in Iowa, from a podium engraved presidentially with the words “TURNING THE PAGE ON IRAQ” and multiple American flags as a backdrop. He was introduced by foreign policy grey eminence Zbignew Brzezinski, 79, who said:
“To make critical judgments: that’s what America is about. Now I’m here today because I strongly believe that the next election is not just to choose a new president. It is much more than that. The choice that you will be making will define America’s role in a historically new era. That’s a fundamentally important choice. We have elections every four years but only once in a while is a new president facing the opportunity to shape a new sense of direction for America, for America in a dramatically changing world…
“In the early 1990s, 15 years ago, the United States emerged as the sole, the only, global superpower. And thus the United States has had since then the opportunity to be the spearhead of global progress in a world that is no longer passive, no longer submissive. We now live in a world which to an unprecedented degree is now politically awakened throughout all of mankind. All of humanity is political conscious, politically stirring, often political restless and resentful. And it is increasingly motivated by a new and very important sense of purpose… the recognition of personal dignity and of respect for diversity. That’s a new yearning. That is what the new world is about. And that’s where America has a unique opportunity to play a decisive and creative role. Tragically, tragically, that opportunity has been squandered by the self-destructive war in Iraq.”
Brzezinski then repeated that sentence – “squandered by the self-destructive war in Iraq” – and delivered the money quote:
“Instead of mobilizing global solidarity the United States has become engaged in a colonial war in the post colonial era.
“Just think of what that means…”
And there it was, laid bare, the entire big mistake, which didn't begin after September 11, 2001, and did not even begin with the Bush presidency. The uber-problem that began “in the early 1990s” (with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet states), rendering a peace dividend at home that was correspondingly squandered along with the opportunity to bring unprecedented peace and progress across the world and in America: an opportunity was squandered by presidential administrations from both US political parties, not just one.
Obama, then introduced, began with a prosecution about “the costs of this war”:
Nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq. Five times that number have suffered horrible wounds, seen and unseen. Loved ones have been lost, dreams denied. Children will grow up without fathers and mothers. Parents have outlived their children. That is a cost of this war.
When all is said and done, the price-tag will run over a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars. That's money not spent on homeland security and counter-terrorism; on providing health care to all Americans and a world-class education to every child; on investments in energy to save ourselves and our planet from an addiction to oil. That is a cost of this war.
Then he offered the specifics that so many had clamored to hear:
We should enter into talks with the Iraqi government to discuss the process of our drawdown. We must get out strategically and carefully, removing troops from secure areas first, and keeping troops in more volatile areas until later. But our drawdown should proceed at a steady pace of one or two brigades each month. If we start now, all of our combat brigades should be out of Iraq by the end of next year.
But Obama did not pander. He offered the bad news, too, honestly and forthrightly:
We will need to retain some forces in Iraq and the region. We'll continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq. We'll protect our forces as they leave, and we will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities. If - but only if - Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we should continue to train and equip those forces. But we will set our own direction and our own pace, and our direction must be out of Iraq. The future of our military, our foreign policy, and our national purpose cannot be hostage to the inaction of the Iraqi government.
Obama rejected the simpleton solution proposed by Senator Clinton and others (removing Iraq Prime Minister Maliki in an undemocratic top-down fashion) and instead called for working with Iraqis, other nations, and the UN, to convene a Constitutional Convention of, by, and for the Iraqis to determine their own path as the US troops would be leaving, brigade by brigade, month by month, underscoring to those in Iraq whose interests favor permanent US occupation that it was no longer a possibility.
Assist, don’t impose, was the zeitgeist of the Obama approach (something that other politicians of both parties have never seemed to understand):
Now the Iraqis may come out of this process choosing some kind of soft partition into three regions - one Sunni, one Shia, one Kurd. But it must be their choice. America should not impose the division of Iraq.
Obama then slapped down the Bush-Cheney dreams of war with Iran:
Iran poses a grave challenge. It builds a nuclear program, supports terrorism, and threatens Israel with destruction. But we hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda, ignoring the violent schism that exists between Shiite and Sunni militants. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven't even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear - loud and clear - from the American people and the Congress: you don't have our support, and you don't have our authorization for another war.
He'll put America's money where its mouth is to help the two million Iraq war refugees:
We should up our share to at least $2 billion to support this effort; to expand access to social services for refugees in neighboring countries; and to ensure that Iraqis displaced inside their own country can find safe-haven.
He smacked Bush down (and generationally, Clinton, too) on the Vietnam meme:
George Bush is afraid of this future. That is why all he can do is drag up the past. After all the flawed justifications for his failed policy, he now invokes Vietnam as a reason to stay in Iraq. Let's put aside the strange reasoning - that all would have been well if we had just stayed the course in Vietnam. Let's put it aside and leave it where it belongs - in the past.
Now is not the time to reargue the Vietnam War - we did that in the 2004 election, and it wasn't pretty. I come from a new generation of Americans. I don't want to fight the battles of the 1960s. I want to reclaim the future for America, because we have too many threats to face and too many opportunities to seize. Just think about what we can accomplish together when we end this war.
And he reminded all again why the person that never supported the war is the best to lead us out of it:
Martin Luther King once stood up at Riverside Church and said, "In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.' We are too late to stop a war that should never have been fought; too late to undo the pain of battle, the anguish of so many families, or the price of the fight; too late to redo the years of division and distraction at home and abroad.
But I'm here today because it's not too late to come together as Americans. Because we're not going to be able to deal with the challenges that confront us until we end this war. What we can do is say that we will not be prisoners of uncertainty. That we reject the conventional thinking that led us into Iraq and that didn't ask hard questions until it was too late. What we can say is that we are ready for something new and something bold and something principled.
Since his speech, the first part aired live on CNN, all of it aired live on CNN online, he’s been interviewed on National Public Radio, too.
And as is evident from a perusing of blog posts and news stories here and elsewhere, Democratic rivals are sniping at Obama saying he doesn’t go far enough, Republican rivals are sniping at Obama, saying he goes too far, but the anti-war issue in the US presidential campaign has become, like it or not, all about Obama, whose name is increasingly synonymous with the struggle to end the war in Iraq, already at a level surpassing where any of them will ever arrive. What Obama said... what Obama will do... what Obama won't do... what Obama should do... No other candidate will achieve becoming the embodiment of the majority American yearning to end the war and to create a mandate to make it so.
And that is the story of September 12, 2007, the day that Barack Obama gained the traction by having the stature to emerge as the unrivaled anti-war candidate for the Democratic nomination.