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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (1292)	2/10/2007 11:42:25 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

barackobama.com

To: coug who wrote (1292)	2/10/2007 12:43:39 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

politicalcurrent.com

To: coug who wrote (1292)	2/11/2007 2:30:47 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

My comment: If Hillary refuses to admit that her Iraq vote was a mistake and instead chooses to beat around the bush like her husband di on Monica, then her candidacy maybe finished. Her refusal to do so would reinforce her arrongant image in the minds of the people. ===================================== Clinton gets third degree over Iraq February 12, 2007 BERLIN, New Hampshire: Campaigning in New Hampshire for the first time as a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton refused to admit that her vote in 2002 for military action in Iraq was a mistake - one of several times the senator came under scrutiny about the war. During the town hall meeting in this economically struggling city on Saturday, the Democrat contender said President George Bush and his advisers came into power in 2001 with an obsession to oust Saddam Hussein and resolve the "unfinished business" of the first Gulf War. "I'm not a psychiatrist," Senator Clinton said. "I don't know all of the reasons behind their concern, some might say their obsession." However, she had difficulty in explaining her evolution from being a strong supporter of the war in 2003 to becoming a staunch critic today. A member of the 300-strong audience asked her to say plainly and "without nuance" that her Senate vote to use force in Iraq in 2002 was a mistake. "Until we hear you say that, we're not going to hear all these other great things you've said," the questioner said. Clinton has not been willing to go as far as some of her Democratic rivals and say that her 2002 vote was a mistake. On Saturday she repeated her standard response, saying she would never have cast the vote if she had had the intelligence information in 2002 that she had now. "I've taken responsibility for my vote," Clinton said. "The mistakes were made by this president." Her comments came the day after a Pentagon watchdog agency released a report into the prewar intelligence, containing new charges that the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to make its case for going to war against Saddam Hussein. Clinton received her most enthusiastic standing ovation when she promised to end the war. "If I had been president in 2003, I never would have started this war, and if it is not ended when I'm president in 2009, I will end it." smh.com.au

To: coug who wrote (1292)	2/13/2007 12:01:32 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Can this man unite America? theherald.co.uk BY JENNIFER CUNNINGHAM February 13 2007 Barack Obama declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the US in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. It was a site chosen with care, a place where Abraham Lincoln made the famous speech which eventually led to the end of slavery in the US. This was a bravura demonstration by Obama of that famously indefinable quality which is the vital ingredient to the highest of elected offices: charisma. It was also a historic challenge to Hillary Clinton's powerfully-backed campaign, big on the sort of ideas which have led to him being dubbed "the new JFK" and compared with Martin Luther King. Since he set the Democratic National Convention alight with rousing speeches in 2004, he's been tipped as the man most likely to become the first black American president. His trump card has been deployed in the battle against Hillary: he was a critic of the Iraq war before the 2003 invasion and is now calling for a cap on the numbers of US troops deployed; she voted for the invasion. His rallying call is that no number of lost American lives can "solve someone else's civil war". The appeal of the 45-year-old senator from Illinois is wider than could reasonably be expected of any one individual. He is the political equivalent of Tiger Woods or Oprah Winfrey: a successful, personable embodiment of the American dream. More to the point, he knows exactly how to draw on his background in a way that resounds across the racial divide. In fact, Oprah has given him her backing and he has the support of billionaire financier George Soros. The son of a Kenyan father, who herded goats before winning a scholarship to America, and a white mother from Kansas, Obama was born in 1961 in Honolulu. His parents met while studying at the University of Hawaii, but separated when he was two, when his father went on to study for a PhD at Harvard. His mother later married an Indonesian and the family, including his younger half sister, moved to Jakarta. He attended Muslim and Catholic schools in Indonesia until he was 10, when he returned to Honolulu to live with his grandparents. It was a childhood which was either going to produce a mixed-up kid or a particularly well-rounded individual. In 1995 Obama published a memoir, Dreams from My Father, in which he recalled a middle-class childhood in which knowledge of his father was gleaned from photographs and family stories. He wrote that at an early age: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me - that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk - barely registered in my mind." His bi-racial inheritance caused him more angst as a teenager and he has admitted to smoking marijuana and taking cocaine, when he "had learned not to care". Now he capitalises on the fact that his extended family reaches from the US to Africa, the Far East and Britain and includes the darkest and palest skin tones. While his well-educated appeal transcends race in a way that American commentators have described as allowing white people not to feel guilty, he faces criticism from the African-American communities, who see his childhood experience as light years from the urban racism experienced by black Americans whose forefathers were slaves. A considerable part of his charm lies in acknowledging his "presumptuousness" and "audacity" in challenging for the race for president, while remaining hugely ambitious. His years in the Senate mean that he has been in Washington long enough "to know that the ways of Washington must change". His most recent book, which reached the bestseller lists, is called The Audacity of Hope, a title which, his critics say, sums up the lack of substance in his politics. His rebuttal is that his record shows exactly where he stands on a wider variety of issues than is true of most politicians. There is some truth in that, not least because it is complicated and generally liberal, but within a pragmatic willingness to work with opponents to achieve progress. It was largely because of his efforts that Illinois became the first state to require taping of police interrogations and criminal confessions. Obama's rhetoric comes close to being as perfectly-pitched as populist politicking can be while retaining philosophical credibility. It remains to be seen whether his multi-racial background combined with Harvard law degree, community work in Chicago, Christian church-going, attractive wife and young daughters and liberal voting record marks him as the candidate to appeal to a new generation looking for an inspiring leader to unite a nation divided over Iraq as it once was over slavery.