Obama Slams Clinton For Iran Vote He Skipped
08 October 2007 10:00 pm by Taylor Marsh
Evidence why no Democrat should ever sign any Lieberman legislation on Iran.
I’ll admit it. I want a fight. I want Edwards and Obama to go at Clinton
and get the game on, though not this way. Mixing it up will only help our candidates and whoever is our nominee.
It’s also the only way Obama is going to really challenge Clinton’s lead. Start
attacking Clinton’s policies and votes. But he sure picked an odd one considering
he was awol on it himself. Via
ABC’s Jake Tapper (h/t TPM), Obama says he opposes the Lieberman-Kyl
legislation (pdf) because “it potentially provides a slippery slope
in how the president can use that language to engage in additional authority
to engage in the war in Iran. And I think we should have learned our lesson
in 2002. You can’t give this president a blank check and then act surprised
when he cashes it.”
Clinton struck back.
“It’s unfortunate that Senator Obama is resorting to the same old attack politics as his poll numbers start falling. He knows that Senator Clinton was one of the first in Congress to say that Bush must seek an explicit authorization from Congress for any military action against Iran and that she is the lead co-sponsor of legislation by Jim Webb to prohibit funds for military action in Iran without approval from Congress. A flagging campaign is not an excuse to distort anyone’s record.” – Phil Singer, Clinton spokesperson (via TPM)
There’s also the reality that this past spring Obama co-sponsored a bill entitled “The
Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007.” One provision goes like this:
(14) the United States should designate the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps, which purveys terrorism throughout the Middle East and plays
an important role in the Iranian economy, as a foreign terrorist organization
under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, place the Iranian
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of specially designated global
terrorists, and place the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the
list of weapons of mass destruction proliferators and their supporters;
Obama wanted the Iranian Revolutionary Guards identified as a terrorist organization, same as Clinton.
Here are two paragraphs struck from the Lieberman-Kyl sense of the Senate legislation:
“(3) that it should be the policy of the United States to combat, contain,
and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq
of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators
such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies;
“(4) to support the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of
United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence,
and military instruments, in support of the policy described in paragraph
(3) with respect to the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its
proxies;”
“Military instruments”? Lieberman is quite the card isn’t
he? Nobody was fooled by these paragraphs, which is why they were struck.
Obama’s objection with the Lieberman-Kyl amendment
is because of the linkage to Iraq and Iran. Okay. So why didn’t he show up, vote against it and make sure he had it as his issue?
Obama certainly needs to sharpen his campaign rhetoric and attack Clinton’s
policies, but he’s not going to be effective when he skipped out on the vote he’s targeting her for. That he has the same stance on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization points to the problem he’s had all along. Their votes are the same, except Clinton put her mark on the Lieberman-Kyl legislation, rightly catching hell for doing so. Where was he? Campaigning one on one is important, but when you miss out on key moments to define yourself differently from your number one opponent it’s time to question priorities.
