The "fairy tale"

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aaad0724-dd13-4ffa-810b-d5d3220ff055

The New Republic has an interesting story about Barack Obama's stance on the war. As you guys know, Obama delivered in a speech in 2002 opposing the war. This speech has become a staple of the Obama campaign, as he has said he opposed the war from the start while Clinton voted to authorize it.

Clinton, of course, took to another extreme, calling Obama's war stance a "fairy tale" and trying to paint him as a flip-flopping opportunist who refused to take a hard stance on the war when that stance became a political risk. In approaching Obama's record this way, the Clintons have angered a slew of voters who believe the Clinton campaign is misrepresenting the truth and created harsh infighting within the Party. Obama, meanwhile, takes more subtle swings at Clinton, emphasizing his own opposition over her vote and therefore keeping ride smoothly along his hope/change theme.

The truth about the Obama's stance on the war, stands pretty squarely in the middle of what the two candidates have been saying, according to the New Republic story.

I've been saying that the Obama camp has been misleading on the war. I think a giant percentage of voters do not realize Obama was not in the Senate for the vote, and an even larger number do not know that 99 of 100 members voted to authorize Iraq. Obama did, however, return to his anti-war roots after a brief period of uncertainty (which was when he pulled the speech from his Web site)

In any case the TNR story makes some good points about the issue, namely:
He did, however, strike a different tone during his star turn at the Democratic National Convention that July. Obama's inspiring keynote address barely mentioned the war. ("There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it," he declared.) More notably, in interviews around that time, Obama refused to say flatly that he would have voted against the 2002 congressional war resolution. "I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports," Obama told The New York Times on July 26. "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that, from my vantage point, the case was not made." In other interviews that week, Obama said, "[T]here is room for disagreement" over initiating the war, and that "I didn't have the information that was available to senators."

That statement, I think, gets to the crux of this debate. Obama acknowledged then that he could not legitimately judge the Senate vote because he was not privy to the same intelligence and was not in the same position as Congress.

The war is obviously going to be an issue in this campaign, and it should. But I wish the candidates would step away from this essentially semantic debate and start discussing the issues where they genuinely differ. I think Clinton would be well-served to stop trying to attack Obama's "fairy tale" and start focusing on their real differences. Any counterattacks she brings tend to bounce back at her -- with teeth.

Of course, she'll have to figure out how to do all this with no money...