I Will Do My Best To Make This My Last OP On Obama's Brussels Remarks, But...

[Rilgin]

93. He avoids criticism from those who will not vote for Democrats anyway

To start I will say I am one of those very disappointed by Obama's presidency. However, I do not believe at heart that Obama is a war-monger or hawk. I think he is a neo-con but is a social system president (neo-liberal solutions to the health care and education systems) rather than a defense president like most Republicans.

I believe that military issues always put Democrats in a box. If he did not defend the US in some way in response to the question he would have been accused of being "weak" from the right. This is always the box democrats find themselves in.

The only problem is that when you take public stances to avoid attacks from the Republican machine, you disillusion your base. This is what happenned yesterday. I do not believe Obama really believes what he said yesterday in defending aspects of the Iraq war. I believe it was purely a political choice. It avoids attacks from the right. I just think Democrats need to find a spine. We are in a divided country and Republicans are opponents no matter what you do or say. Accept the attacks from the right and speak the truth thereby energizing and strengthening your own base and the Democratic Brand as speaking truth. The people listening and believing Republican attacks on weakness of Democrats will not or are not inclined to Vote Democratic anyhow and my opinion is that it keeps the Democratic Party from attaining the true electoral victories that polls on support of our issues show we should be obtaining.

This thinking applies to all politically inspired speechs and votes where politicians dissemble or triangulate to avoid political attacks rather than do the right thing. In particular I am thinking of Hillary and Kerry voting for "The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002" and later justifying it by two forms of untruth (1) their Votes were wrong in retrospect but they were misinformed and believed the Intelligence Reports on WMD at the time and (2) their affirmative Votes on was not an authorization for the Iraq War but just gave the President cards to play (it had the requirement that Bush come back to Congress which he ignored of course). In both cases, Hillary and Kerry and everyone who generally pays attention (I assume Senators actually pay attention to politics and policy generally) , knew that the Bush case was built on air and that the Resolution was an approval of the Iraq War. The Kerry and Hillary Votes were political calculations to avoid attacks from the right rather than support the base. Notably, neither got elected or energized the base and the guy (Obama) who was against the bad war energized the base and got elected in a landslide.

From that point, it is disappointing that Obama gave a speech that was not based on truth but based on political calculation to avoid attacks from the right and the effect is the same as shown here on DU. It avoids attacks from the right on this point but disillusions the base once again and gives no support to the Democratic Brand as truth tellers.