Senator Hillary Clinton (L) listens as Senator Barack Obama addresses a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington November 17, 2005. American voters have a chance to shatter social barriers in 2008, when either Obama or Clinton could snap the unbroken string of white men in the White House. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)The last couple of days have been busy for me--mainly babysitting my four-year-old niece. So blogging has been light. But there have been some stories that I found especially interesting.
The first isn't much of a breaking story. I've known that Illinois Senator Barack Obama was going to run for the 2008 White House. The question here was when is going to announce his candidacy. Well, Obama has announced his intention to run. This is from the Contra Costa Times:
WASHINGTON - Sen. Barack Obama's decision to take the first formal step toward running for president caps an extraordinarily rapid rise in politics -- and sets up a high-stakes competition for campaign money, staff members and supporters with the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Obama's announcement Tuesday that he had established a presidential exploratory committee creates a face-off between the first strong black and female candidates for president, adding sizzle and a sense of historic significance to the competition for the party's nomination.
Having served barely two years in the Senate, Obama also is testing a sturdy piece of conventional political wisdom in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: that voters are wary of electing a president who might need on-the-job training in foreign policy.
The Illinois Democrat, 45, is gambling that voters will see his lack of national governing experience as an asset, not a liability, at a time when the electorate is seething with discontent with the Washington establishment.
"I am struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics," Obama said in his Tuesday announcement. "The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put us in a precarious place." In a sign of the importance of the Internet to political campaigning, Obama made his announcement not in a public appearance but in an e-mail statement and a video posted on his Web site.
Now there are a couple of interesting things about this story. First is that Obama is betting that his lack of national governing experience is seen as an asset. Obama is trying to run as a true outsider, where he can provide a unique perspective and ideas to the American voters, rather than having the voters choose between the same, corrupting Washington establishment candidates. This is Obama's shot against Arizona's Republican senator John McCain, who is an entrenched Washington establishment senator that has been portraying himself as a "maverick senator" for years. But this is also a big shot against former First Lady and New York senator Hillary Clinton.
And here is the problem. Obama has stated his opposition to the Iraq war. He has staked a claim as an anti-war candidate for the 2008 presidential elections, and he is one of the major front-runners in the Democratic primary race. Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004--two years after the Senate voted to give President Bush the authorization to go to war in Iraq. Obama has a clean slate for which to create his anti-war candidacy, and sell it to an American public that has turned against this war. This is placing Hillary Clinton's un-announced presidential candidacy in a serious bind. Clinton has been a supporter of the Iraq war, but has recently been trying to craft a centrist path on the war, criticizing Bush's conduct of the war, but still refusing to call for any major troop withdrawals from Iraq. What Clinton may have been trying to do is to stake a centrist position on Iraq in order to gather support, and votes, among moderates, centrists, and independents for her own 2008 presidential run, while expecting the liberal, anti-war wing of the Democratic Party to blindly follow along, due to her own front-runner status. In a sense, Hillary Clinton is trying to run a general election campaign strategy of courting the moderates and centrists for the Democratic primary, while ignoring the hard-core liberal elements of the Democratic Party (As an ironic side note, McCain is crafting the opposite campaign strategy of courting the extreme hard-core conservative elements of the Republican Party for his own Republican Party's presidential bid, while ignoring the moderates and centrists). Barack Obama's entry as a true anti-war Democratic Party candidate has thrown Clinton's centrist campaign theme into disarray. Here is a strong, charismatic, fresh, anti-war candidate that has a serious shot at winning the White House as the first black president. Obama is giving Hillary a run for her money now.
Which is why we have this little McClatchy story coming out now:
WASHINGTON - Just back from Iraq and facing doubters in her own party, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., on Wednesday opposed President Bush's plan to send more troops and offered an alternative that stops short of an immediate withdrawal or cutting funds.
Instead, Clinton called for capping U.S. troop deployments in Iraq at Jan. 1 levels, beginning soon to move them out of Baghdad and eventually redeploying forces to Afghanistan. She also stressed that Iraq's government must meet benchmarks for political progress before it gets more U.S. aid.
Despite Clinton's stiffened posture on Iraq, the war remains a political burden for her as she weighs a 2008 run for the presidency. The Democratic Party base is staunchly anti-war and displeased that she has never rejected her October 2002 vote to authorize the war. While she's voicing greater opposition to Bush's war leadership, she's not as fervently anti-war as some of her rivals for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
Clinton is being forced to shift her position further left as a result of Obama's anti-war candidacy. Obama's announcement as an anti-war candidate has certainly excited the Democratic Party--especially the more liberal, anti-war wing of the party. This is giving Obama some early momentum in the Democratic race, even if it is this early. So Hillary has been forced to shift her position. She opposed to the Bush surge plan--but then again, just about every Democrat in Congress is opposed to the Bush surge plan, and some Republicans. Instead of accepting the liberal anti-war wing of the Democratic Party's call for withdrawing the troops, Clinton is calling for a cap on the number of troops in Iraq, and then redeploying them from Iraq to Afghanistan. She stops short of accepting the withdrawal plans, favoring a redeployment plan from Iraq to Afghanistan. Clinton is still courting the moderates and independents in the Democratic Party:
Clinton's announcement Wednesday didn't immediately appease anti-war activists. "She's saying the right things; the question will be, does she support Congress using the powers it has to put the measures she's talking about into effect?" said Tom Mattzie, the Washington director of the liberal group MoveOn.org. "It's not sufficient to oppose. You've got to work to stop the president. We'll wait and see."
But some independent analysts thought Clinton's centrist stand might appeal to a broader base of Democrats and independents.
Clinton "had to begin taking a position that can get her good ratings in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire," said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University. But "she also understands there's a lot of military families and others who are Democrats who don't just want to see Iraq abandoned.
"I don't know politically if it will work," he said. "The liberal wing wants raw meat. It may actually be an honest effort by her to say, `How can we get this wrapped up?'''
At a packed afternoon news conference, Clinton, who had advertised parts of her plan on morning television and radio shows, declared: "We have to change course."
She said that U.S. forces in Iraq should be redeployed to Afghanistan, where they could make a difference: "The president's team is pursuing a failed strategy in Iraq as it edges closer to collapse, and Afghanistan needs more of our concerted effort and attention."
But she said she's not willing to cut off funding for the troops yet, in part because she thinks there are national security interests at risk. She also expressed uncertainty that her plan will win enough votes.
So we've got an interesting race shaping up on the Democratic side. Do we pull out of Iraq completely, as the Barack Obama campaign is staking? Or do we continue to stay in Iraq to complete the mission, and perhaps redeploy the troops into Afghanistan as the Hillary Clinton campaign is staking?
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