Obama Heads Home After Rough Week
Nick Timiraos reports from Casper, Wyo., on the presidential race.
Sen. Barack Obama heads home to Chicago tonight, ending a week that he’d rather soon forget.
The week began with his campaign disputing a Canadian government memo that said his top economic adviser had told consular officials that his antitrade rhetoric was political talk. And it ended with an unpaid foreign-policy adviser suggesting that, if elected president, he would revisit his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq within 16 months.
In a BBC interview, Harvard professor Samantha Power called his withdrawal proposal a “best-case scenario.” “He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator,” she said, instead suggesting he would devise a new plan based on advice from military officials to which he doesn’t currently have access.
The adviser resigned from the campaign on Friday for other remarks, in which she called Sen. Hillary Clinton a “monster,” but not before Clinton laid into the Illinois senator during a speech in Hattiesburg, Miss. “He has attacked me continuously for having no hard exit date, and now we learn he doesn’t have one, in fact he doesn’t have a plan at all,” she told reporters, according to the Associated Press.
Speaking to a crowd of around 1,200 voters in Casper, Wyo., Obama rejected the idea that his rival had “standing” to question his commitment to withdraw troops because she had voted to authorize the war.
“It was because of George Bush with an assist from Hillary Clinton and John McCain that we entered into this war,” he said to growing applause. “I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”
He pivoted his critique to clarify his own withdrawal plan. “I don’t want us to see Iraq collapse,” he said.
The two episodes, over trade and the war, knocked the usually disciplined candidate, and campaign, off-message during a week when he lost two important contests in Ohio and Texas that gave Clinton a big boost. |
