Love the shot of Obama outside the West Wing

"Now one of Clinton’s laws of politics is this: If one candidate’s trying to scare you and the other one’s trying to get you to think, if one candidate’s appealing to your fears and the other one’s appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope."

-Bill Clinton, 2004

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/25/pzn.01.html

Greg, you should probably specify that the Clinton campaign is the one that brought up McPeak. Otherwise folks may say you are being biased for Clinton.

OBAMA JUST SAID THIS ON CNN:

"I just want to take a moment to respond to an ad that Senator Clinton is apparently running today that asks, 'Who do you want answering the phone in the White House when it’s 3am and something has happened in the world?'

"We’ve seen these ads before. They’re the kind that play on peoples’ fears to scare up votes.

"Well it won’t work this time. Because the question is not about picking up the phone. The question is – what kind of judgment will you make when you answer? We’ve had a red phone moment. It was the decision to invade Iraq. And Senator Clinton gave the wrong answer. George Bush gave the wrong answer. John McCain gave the wrong answer.

"But I stood up and said that a war in Iraq would cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I said that it would distract us from the real threat we face – and that we should take the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That’s the judgment I made on the most important foreign policy decision of our generation, and that’s the kind of judgment I’ll show when I answer that phone in the White House as President of the United States – the judgment to keep us safe, to go after our real enemies, and to provide the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States with the equipment they need when we do send them into battle, and the respect and care they have earned when they come home. And I’ll never see the threat of terrorism as a way to scare up votes, because it’s a threat that should rally this country around our common enemies. That’s the judgment we need at 3am. And that’s the judgment that I am running for President to provide."

Obama is very good at this, even the small details. Notice the order of "wrong anwers": Clinton, Bush, McCain - neat bookends.

Although it's true, as the securities laws require persons selling securities to say, that "past results do not guarantee future performance", they do remain about as good a predictor as I know of. So too with the contrasting judgments (no quote marks) of Sens. Obama and Clinton regarding the Iraq war.
This is especially true when the judgments in question arise not out of being “lucky” (quoting Aimey May) or un -“lucky” -- but rather from a careful process of decision-making, likely (agreed -- there are no guarantees; I only say “likely” (quoting myself)) to be followed in the future whether dealing with a similar of dissimilar\ set of facts or issues.
It is true that “[a] lot of people were against the war”, as Aimey May says. Of those “a lot of people”, at least a substantial number were aware of, and cited, well-documented, well-informed evidence either of circumstances directly contrary to the assertions of the administration or tending to impugn the credibility of specific assertions, whether the matter asserted were true or not.
Obama has said that he examined much evidence, available in the public domain, of this sort. Sen. Clinton was not limited to evidence available in the public domain. She was privy to a National Intelligence Evaluation that raised substantial doubt regarding the credibility of the administration’s claims. She excused her vote in part by saying that she did not read the Estimate.
That it seems to me is, if anything, more damning than the vote itself. One can debate the wisdom of the vote, although I concede that I cannot imagine any debater convincing me that there was any wisdom in it, but it seems hard to me to see how one can defend not reading the Estimate.
Critics of Sen. Clinton have contended that her vote was determined by an inclination to pander to one or another group, or to many, rather than being based on a good faith assessment of the evidence and its implications.
I acknowledge that I agree with this criticism. But I don’t know that the criticism is true, so I won’t rest an assessment of Sen. Clinton on the assumption that the criticism is true. What I do know is that she did not read the NIE, and she has never claimed to have examined rigorously -- much less carefully explained her rejection of -- the publicly available evidence that either contradicted or impugned the credibility of the administration’s claims.
For these reasons I conclude that even on the assumption that she acted in good faith, and not for self-serving political purposes, she acted with at best reckless disregard of the truth and its consequences.
But even worse than that -- when for whatever reason (i.e., political expediency or careful re-evaluation) Sen. Clinton became a critic of the “execution” of the war, she refused to acknowledge that her vote for the AUMF was intended to approve the conduct that Bush took but was rather intended to give the President congressional support in aid of a diplomatic solution.
For this I judge Sen. Clinton even more culpable that I do for not having read the NIE. The AUMF is a very short document (it’s title is even shorter and has a pretty univocal meaning: “Authorization for the Use of Military Force”; it’s hard to fault the President for regarding votes for the AUMF as votes authorizing him to Use Military Force. There is nothing in the body of the AUMF that requires, or even asks, the President to use diplomatic means in preference to military means. There is nothing in the AUMF that limits the action that the president is authorized to take. To attempt to explain a vote for the AUMF as a vote intended to support diplomatic action and to assert that in voting for the AUMF one did not intend to authorize the action actually taken by the President pursuant to the AUMF, one must be either i) speaking in good faith -- believing what one says -- and very stupid; or ii) speaking in bad faith -- knowingly lying (and either contemptuously believing that the public will not perceive the lie or contemptuously not caring whether the public will perceive the lie or not).

Whichever account accurately describes Sen. Clinton’s conduct, the conduct is in my judgment not worthy of the presidency.
And as to Sen. Obama, whether any future judgments prove as tragically vindicated by evolving events as was his initial rejection of the argument for war, I am given more confidence that a judgment reached by the process he followed with respect to Iraq will be so vindicated than that a judgment reached however Sen. Clinton reached hers would be vindicated.