Ok, the Lugar-0bama nuclear non-proliferation law that he marshalled through the senate and got signed into law is meaningless. Nah, nothing about foreign policy, its only about nuclear freaking non-proliferation. And what did clinton do on foreign policy? How about mccain? Other than photo ops in iraq markets, what?

Give me a break.

Huh. I didn't get the same negative sense from that piece.

In any event, had he been a junior Senator who made a big splash by "aggressively" questioning people, he'd be criticized for being a grandstander.

Face it. You're going to be criticized no matter how you act.

But good on the AP for repeating the "naive" theme. The press is pretty embarassing these days.

Let's point out HRC's Foreign Policy record: a vote for a war (without reading the 95-page Nat. Intelligence Estimate no one on her staff ahd access to), and a vote for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution on Iran. Experience we can surely do without!

What a BS way to characterize a rather flattering article on Obama. You're a hack.

I should have read the article first. You know eric when you plagarize a bullet point from a talking points memo from the clinton campaign as a title to a post, you should at least credit the source. The article was nothing like your post and headline. In fact, the title to the article referred to his cooperative approach to foreign policy as opposed to the clinton/bush approach of confrontation. Pathetic.

I guess I missed all of the "investigations and aggressive oversight" conducted by Hillary and McCain over the last eight years.

This thing again? Didn't we already go through the European Affairs subcommittee issue when the Clinton campaign started trumpeting it.

In any case, in seven years in the Senate Clinton has accomplished nothing in the foreign policy field equivalent in importance to the Obama-Lugar law.

Is this really a notable piece? On foreign policy clout, a President Obama with a world wide appeal who rejects the policies of bomb/regime change that HRC has signed on to, will wield much more clout than the well-travelled former first lady.

"Report: Obama Short On Foreign Policy Experience"?

I'm not sure how one could read that AP article and take out of it as the main message that they painted a "less-than-flattering" picture of Obama. Eric misread the piece, in my opinion.

Besides, if down-in-the-muck handling of foreign policy was a necessary prerequisite to become president we would have had more than 15 senators elected as president, and wouldn't have had 17 governors elected as president.

this really is a very misleading passage taken out of context

She was in the WH for 8 years and the President's closest adviser.

Not admitting this experience is a severe lack of intellectual honesty.

Obama said he would not run for President until he served in the Senate to get experience.

He lied and ran anyway.

These are facts and intellectual honesty.

This seemed to be the most interesting quote, since it shows the benefit of Barack's bipartisan approach that Hillary seems to enjoy denigrating so much [emphasis mine]:

"The young senator's approach to issues attracted the attention of Lugar, the committee's senior Republican. After their visit to former Soviet states, the two co-sponsored legislation aimed at making it easier to detect and destroy weapons stockpiles. More recently, Lugar signed on as co-sponsor of Obama's anti-poverty proposal."

So I guess you can actually get things done by cooperating--who knew?

Your headline is misleading Eric. The AP cites no "report". Their headline is much different. McCain and Hillary's campaigns are the critics. Obama became the chair of the European subcommittee in January 2007. He announced his candidacy February 7.

Joe Biden inadvertently proved that dragging recalcitrant Bush admin officials up to the Hill for pointless hearings wasn't going to get them to change policy or win him any primaries.

Obama's spoken out many times on foreign affairs, his positions are much better than McCain's "bomb Iran but not Al Qaeda" policy and Hillary's "coercive diplomacy". Our military's hands are full. Our army's "big stick" is worn to a nub in Iraq. We're not in a position for the immediate future to be throwing our weight around coercing any but the weakest adversaries. Bush has wrecked our soft and hard power and we need to rebuild our standing in the world. And America that's come to it's senses by electing Obama is a start our allies will welcome.

What was the title of this post before Eric amended it, by the way?

The obvious question is: compared to who?

US foreign policy is so abyssmal, that it would be surprising that anyone could do much worse.

Unless you think that 50 years of Castro, Chavez's take over of South america, sole reliance upon dictator Husharaf, and alienation of former alies in Europe are sterling achievements of the current foreign policy establishment.

It is sad to see a great institution like associated press to be pimped out by the mythical, lacking in substance so called political pros from the Clinton campaign----twice in one week.

Christ, did TPM actually read the article before posting that excerpt? A 'less-than-flattering picture'? It wasn't absolutely worshipful, perhaps, but I'll take that kind of balanced portrait any day!

The TPM excerpt gives COMPLETELY the wrong impression.

Weird, "COMPLETELY the wrong impression" would give the idea that the article was relatively flattering to Obama.

But then again, nuclear non-proliferation, one of the driest must beaten-to-death areas of foreign policy somehow comes out as hot and sexy to you folks. (Like wasn't non-prolif so 90's? Didn't we have Republicans complaining that Bill Clinton was giving money to the Russians unnecessarily to help demantle their nukes, such as much of the giveaway of the space station?). Lessee, what exactly is this Obama-Lugar extension of Nunn-Lugar (around since 1991 or so)? Oh wow, $36 million for destroying conventional weapons, $12 million for hunting down WMDs. Now that's one big-ass program, almost 0.1% of the Homeland Security budget and 0.01% of the Pentagon budget. To give you an idea, Bush spent $442 million to hire, train and equip 2200 new Border Patrol Agents. So let's just say $12 million pays for maybe 55 new WMD agents without going into whether they'll have money to travel to Russia with love.

There's something about the soft bigotry of low expectations. Oops, that was 2000's slogan, have to come up with another.