Apparently, some DC leaders say Obama has not done much. I understand now why they think that way.
Transcript of Obama, McCaskill Response to Clinton on MTP
Reporter Question: And my question is for Senator Obama, this morning Senator Clinton on “Meet the Press” said that your campaign has actually distorted what she said about Martin Luther King and all this talk of not running typical campaigns etc. I’m wondering if you would respond to that and also your reaction to her comments about King and Lyndon Johnson. Did you take offense?
Obama: This is fascinating to me. I mean I think what we saw this morning is why the American people are tired of Washington politicians and the games they play. But Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement. I haven’t remarked on it and she I think offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that, but the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous. I have to point out that instead of telling the American people about her positive vision for America, Senator Clinton spent an hour talking about me and my record in a way that was flat out wrong. She suggested that I didn’t clearly and unambiguously oppose the war in Iraq when it is absolutely clear and anyone who has followed this knows that I did. I stood up against the war when she was voting for it, at a time when she didn’t read the intelligence reports or give diplomacy a chance. She belittled the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate despite the fact that she stood on the sidelines during that negotiations on that bill. I have to say that she started this campaign saying that she wanted to make history and lately she has been spending a lot of time rewriting it. I know that in Washington it is acceptable to say or do anything it takes to get elected but I really don’t think that is the kind of politics that is good for our party and I don’t think it is good for our country and I think that the American people will reject it in this election. What I want to do is spend talking about how we are going to make sure that people who are losing their jobs get work. How are we going to make sure that our young people are going to afford college? How are we going to make sure that the sub-prime lending crisis does not lead to an all out recession? How are we going to create the kind of foreign policy that allows us to bring our troops home and makes us safer and goes after a genuine terrorist threat? Those are the issues that we are going to spend time talking about in this campaign and if Senator Clinton wants to be distracted by the sorts of political point scoring that was evident today then that is going to be her prerogative.
Senator McCaskill: Let me speak briefly to Barack’s role to the ethics legislation because I had a front row seat. Before I went to Washington as a freshman senator, I got a call that Senator Obama wanted to have a conference call with all the freshman senators and of course we all did that and we all got on the phone with Senator Obama. And he was calling to ask us to help him on the ethics legislation and he warned us that when we got to Washington that there would be some of the more senior members of the Senate that would act like they wanted to pass the ethics legislation, but he explained to us that they really didn’t want to pass it. And that it was going to take a lot of pushing and pulling to get this ethics legislation done and that the freshman class was going to be essential in that. And he recruited us to be monolithic in our support of the provisions that he was pushing. I frankly thought that he was exaggerating at the time. I hadn’t obviously taken my seat in the senate yet. I got to the senate and it turned out that he was right. There was a lot of wink, wink, nod, nod going on around the floor on some of the provisions of the bill. Most notably that the idea that senators could take corporate airplanes anywhere they wanted in the country for pennies on the dollar. And I watched as the more senior senators tried to maneuver and keep that provision out of the bill. And I watched Barack Obama stand in the well and refuse to kind of back off on that and we helped. And we did so because he prepared us and urged us to back his position for real ethics reform. Was the bill perfect? No, it wasn’t. Can we do more? Of course we can, and of course we want to. And I know as president Barack will help us set a standard for ethics in Washington that will bring a new day. But to belittle that legislation really is not appropriated because it was substantial, it was real and it was hard fought and Barack Obama was at the fulcrum and was the one actually carrying the load to get it across the finish line.
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