Exclusive Interview with Progressive House Congressional Caucus Co-Chair Lynn Woolsey
on The Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour
on KTYM Radio Los Angeles November 12, 2010

The Hutchinson Report:
Many are not familiar with the Progressive House Caucus. How big is it?
LW:
We had 83 members before the election. It is bicameral with House and Senate members. It’s by far the largest caucus in Congress. We lost four members this election. But we also gained a couple of new members. We will not have less than 80 members in the next Congress. The Blue Dog Democrats lost almost two thirds of their members.
THR:
What are the major issues that the Caucus will press Congress and the Obama Administration on?
LW:
It is clear that we represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. So, the first item is jobs. We have to have a robust jobs bill. One that we should have had when President Obama first took office and his popularity was at its height. He had a big majority in the House and Senate. We would have doubled the amount of money allocated for the jobs bill that came out of the House which the Senate cut to the shreds. The other priority is combating the notion that the timetable for ending the Afghanistan war is 2014. The war is killing our budget, killing our people, and killing our relations with our allies.
THR:
What does it take to make that happen?
LW:
None of this is going to happen until we get money out of politics, get a bigger control of the media, and that means diversifying ownership beyond the three corporations.
THR:
The headline article in the Washington Post, November 11, was “Liberals plan to push Obama not to compromise with GOP.” Will the Progressive Caucus take the lead in pushing the president not to ‘compromise’ with the GOP?
LW:
We were the most productive House in recent legislative history in getting key pieces of legislation passed. Unfortunately, it was not enough. We were in such a deep economic hemorrhaging. We stopped that. But to do more we have to be even bolder in our actions. We’re going to push the White House to come forth with bold steps. It’s not too late now. But it will be in two years. So we’re hoping that he recognizes that.
THR:
White House advisor David Axelrod was quoted to the effect that Obama would compromise on the “big issues” Did that set off alarm bells with you and the Caucus members?
LW:
I and Caucus co-chair Raul M. Grijalva sent the President a letter Friday, November 12 that we totally support rolling back the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy. And no cuts in other programs such as food stamps that benefit the poor and needy.
THR:
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberals and progressives as the “professional Left” for continuing to criticize the president despite what he’s tried to accomplish.
LW:
I totally disagreed with him. I’ve won office with 70 percent of the vote and there is a large base of voters that are progressive. This is America and they do have the right to express themselves. And criticism or not of us, we’re not going to stop our criticism on policy issues we disagree with. In fact, in line with the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the House Pacific Asian Caucus we will represent a good majority of the Democrats who remain in the House.
THR:
So no compromise on the core issues
LW:
Any idea that we’re going to reach across the aisle and surrender our democratic ideals on jobs, health care, education, and fighting for working people and not the wealthy is not going to happen. We’re not going to compromise our votes to support programs just to appear that we’re compromising. We’re not going to start from the right of center and go further to the right. That’s not what the nation needs.
THR:
There were reports that during the health care debate the White House shunned the Progressive Caucus. How accurate is that?
LW:
No we were not shunned. I still hear the president saying, ‘Lynn what’s our agenda on health care and what’s to be done to secure passage.’ We took groups of representatives to the White House more than once for meetings. We always had an open door relationship to work with the president and the House leadership. We intend to continue to work with the president. He will have a hard time getting anything done if he doesn’t have us with him. And he knows that. But we’re not going to compromise with the right on some lukewarm programs that should have been much bolder. The public option in the health care fight was a good example of that. We still feel it was given away before the health care debate really began. So we’re not going to roll over. Most of our members won reelection and in some ways we’ll have an even bigger voice in the next Congress.
THR:
Nancy Pelosi wants to stay in the House Leadership. Do you support her?
LW:
I’m one hundred percent behind her. None of the accomplishments in this past Congress would have happened without her leadership. They label her as some wild eyed liberal, but that’s just name calling. She’s an effective leader. And the administration knows that. I’m confident that she will be our Minority House Leader.

The Presidential Debates That Aren’t

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

OK, we now know for the umpteenth time that Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain will cut taxes, provide affordable health care to everyone, drill for more oil, expand nuclear power use, end global warming, rein in the Wall Street fast buck artists, take out Osama Bin Laden, and end the war in Iraq either by withdrawal or victory. And yes we know that both have had a tough family upbringing, and therefore they know what working people have to go through.

These themes have been rehashed and reworked so many times that we can recite them in our sleep. But what we don’t know and certainly haven’t heard in the debates is what Obama and McCain will do about failing urban public schools, the HIV-AIDS pandemic, their view of the death penalty, the drug crisis, how they’ll combat hate crimes, shore up crumbling and deteriorating urban transportation systems, and what type of judges they will appoint to the federal judiciary and to the Supreme Court.
The latter is especially crucial since there may be two possibly three high court vacancies during the first McCain or Obama White House term. We don’t know what they’ll do about these problems because the debate format, the questions and questioners, and even the internet queries play it close, predictable and safe. The result is that the only thing the 50 to 60 million viewers who have tuned into the two debates know what McCain and Obama have to say about these equally vital public policy concerns and problems can only be gleaned from canned snippets from their speeches on the campaign trail, or more likely by going to their campaign websites. For most, that’s not going to happen.

Even on the issues of health care, Iraq, and Iran that the debates have obsessed on, the response from Obama and McCain has been a disappointment, a disappointment that is in that neither has gone much past the canned lines that they have endlessly recited when asked their stance on them. But there were at least two or three moments during debate two when both contenders seemed poised to turn and face each other, take the gloves off, and directly challenge each other on their votes and positions on legislation on taxes, health care, Iraq, and Iran. For instance when McCain demanded that Obama come clean and tell what the penalties would be on small businesses with his health care plan. Or, when Obama charged that McCain voted against the Children Health Act. Or, when McCain implored Obama to admit that the surge in Iraq worked, and wanted to know why he still wouldn’t admit it. Or, when Obama claimed that McCain voted multiple times against alternative energy funding.
These were missed opportunities for the voters to really get the measure of each one beyond the stock pitches. In the three week countdown to E Day, November 4, my suspicion is that voters will still be in a fog regarding Obama and McCain’s stance on the “other” issues that have gotten only the barest of shrift. But then again there’s one more debate.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Democrats Hands Aren’t Clean in the Financial Mess

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The normally expansive Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was anything but that when she was asked if the Democrats should get some of the blame for the Wall Street financial mess. Pelosi answered with a terse “no.” But Pelosi quickly got expansive when she finger pointed Bush and the Republicans for creating the mess. This is the standard Pelosi line. Bush and the Republicans eagerly cut sweetheart deals with financial industry lobbyists to gut lending and stock trading regulations, winked and nodded at the banks and brokerage houses as they engaged in an orgy of dubious stock swapping, buys, and trading, conned millions of homeowners into taking out catastrophic sub prime loans, and watered down the oversight powers of government regulatory agencies.
But Pelosi’s Bush rap is disingenuous. Democratic president Jimmy Carter and Congressional Democrats kicked off the rush to deregulate in the late 1970s when they cajoled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax lending standards for banks and S&Ls to provide more home loans for home seekers. Their goal was noble. It was to get the financial industry to loosen the lending purse strings to lower income and minority home buyers.

But relaxing the standards heightened the risk to banks and lenders and sent the signal that Democrats were willing to also relax regulations and oversight on banks and lenders. It was a short step from that to relaxing regulations and oversight on other financial transactions by the banking and brokerage houses.
It didn’t take long for Democrats and Republicans in Congress to take that step. Under relentless pressure from top bankers during the 1990s, Congress scrapped most of the provisions of the decades old Glass-Steagall Act. The Act was a Depression era measure that kept federally insured banks out of the go-go world of stock trading, exotic lending, and financial speculation. It also set rigid standards for mortgage lending and strict oversight over banking practices.

Clinton’s Treasury secretary Robert Rubin lobbied hard for dumping the Act. The rationale being that U.S. banks and brokerage houses needed to have the restrictions snatched off to stay competitive with Asian and European bankers and financial traders. President Clinton bought the line. The revision bill passed with bipartisan support in 1999 and Clinton quickly signed it.
Despite the havoc to the financial markets and damage to consumers the gut of the Act has created, Clinton still says that he has no regrets over signing the bill. The one regret that Clinton has in hindsight is that he didn’t push harder for tougher oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and financial traders. Clinton’s regret rings hollow given that it was Congressional Democrats and Democratic mayors who clamored the loudest to relax the oversight rules under the guise of bumping up minority homeownership. And it was Rubin and other Clinton administration officials who pushed Congress to loosen the constraints on financial trading.
In 2005, Senate Democrats had another chance to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate Banking Committee passed a bill to give regulators the power to require companies to shed their investments in risky assets (the so-named government-sponsored enterprises GSE reform bill).
The bill never got to the Senate floor thanks to Democrats. They killed it in committee. Democrats continued to parrot the line that any limitations on the financial industry would hamper its ability to compete in the financial markets. This was only part of the reason Democrats flacked for the financial industry. The other part is the sway that industry lobbyists have over Congress through the gargantuan amounts of cash they dump into the campaign coffers of top Democrats. That includes Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Banking Committee Chair and short lived Democratic presidential candidate Christopher Dodd.
Obama got more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama’s top presidential campaign contributors and bundlers read like a who’s who of Wall Street bigwigs. They have either directly contributed or bundled millions of dollars into his campaign.
Clinton ranks number 12 on the Fannie and Freddie PAC gift list. She has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees.
Dodd grabbed the top spot on the list of Fannie and Freddie PAC campaign payouts. He has received more than $165,000. Yet, Dodd has screamed just as loud as Pelosi that the blame for the financial muddle lay exclusively with Bush and Republican bungled policies.

Dodd griped that the Bush Bailout scheme was too skimpy on details. That’s a sure sign that if, or when, the Bush plan gets to the Senate, Dodd and other Senate Democrats will back it. Why not? They’re no different than Bush and Congressional Republicans in giving Wall Street pretty much everything else it has wanted, Pelosi’s Republican saber rattle notwithstanding.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Why McCain and Obama Won’t Talk about Race, but Should

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made one speech in March to damp down
the furor over his relationship with his controversial former pastor Jeremiah Wright. He made another speech at the NAACP convention in July. Other than those two speeches he has not uttered another word about racial issues since. Republican rival John McCain spoke at the same NAACP convention. Shortly after that, he issued a terse statement backing the Ward Connerly concocted anti-affirmative action initiative on the November ballot in Arizona and two other states. Other than that he has not uttered a single word about racial issues since. The audience for McCain and Obama’s speeches at the NAACP convention were mostly blacks. That reinforced the notion that racial issues are by, and for, blacks, with no broad policy implications for all Americans as issues such as health care, jobs and the economy, terrorism and Iraq.

About the only talk about race during the campaign has been the interminable Hydra headed question of: Can Obama make history by being the first African American president? And if he doesn’t will race sink him? That’s hardly the candid, free wheeling, in-depth talk about the problems that impact the lives of millions of black, Latino Asian, and American Indian voters. Minority voters make up about one quarter of American voters and they deserve to hear what the candidates have to say about racial matters, and more importantly what their administration plans to do about them.
Obama and McCain’s racial blind spot has been ritual blindness in all candidates in recent America presidential races. Racial issues have seeped into presidential debates only when they ignite public anger and division. In a 1988 debate, Bush Sr. hammered Democratic contender Michael Dukakis as being a card carrying ACLU’er, a milksop on crime, and tossed in the Willie Horton hit to drive home the point. In one of their debates in 2000, Bush and Democratic challenger, Al Gore clashed over affirmative action.

Race has been a taboo subject for presidents and their challengers on the campaign trail for the past two decades for a simple reason. No president or presidential challenger, especially a Democratic challenger, will risk being tarred as pandering to minorities for the mere mention of racial problems. In stark contrast, Obama, let alone McCain, would never worry about being accused of pandering to Christian Evangelicals by talking incessantly about gay marriage and abortion.
The double standard on race is troublesome to Team Obama. The team knows that race is a minefield that can blow up at any time and the explosion can fatally harm their candidate. Even something seemingly incidental such as the media and public’s outlandish gossipy obsession with vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin poses a risk. In this case, her presence alone in the race has hurt. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll days after her entrance found that McCain was now beating oout Obama among white women. The month before Palin came along he was tied with him among the women.

But polls, white voter wariness over race, and Obama and McCain’s nervous eye on them can’t magically make racial issues disappear. In each of it’s annual State of Black America reports the past decade the National Urban League found that blacks are less likely to own their own homes, die earlier, are far more likely to be jailed disproportionately and receive longer sentences, receive less or poorer quality health care and earn far less than whites. They attend failing public schools, and are more likely the victims of racially motivated hate crimes than any other group.
The report also found rampant discrimination and gaping economic disparities between Latinos and whites. In the past decade, the income, and education performance gaps between blacks and Latinos and whites have only marginally closed, or actually widened. Discrimination remains the major cause of the disparities.

Shunting race to the back burner of presidential campaigns invariably means that presidents shunt them to the backburner of their legislative agenda. Yet, presidents have not been able to tap dance around racial problems. Reagan's administration was embroiled in affirmative action battles. Bush Sr.'s administration was tormented by urban riots following the beating of black motorist Rodney King. Clinton's administration was saddled with conflicts over affirmative action, police violence and racial profiling. W. Bush's administration has been confronted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, voting rights, reparations, and affirmative action battles, gang violence, and failing inner city public schools. By ignoring, or downplaying these issues until they burst into flashpoints of national debate and conflict, presidents have been ill prepared to craft meaningful legislation and programs to deal with them.
In the closing weeks of the campaign McCain and Obama will repeatedly tell how their administration will deal with problems from the Iraq War to the economy. They should also tell how their administration will deal with the crisis problems that slam minorities and the poor. One or the other will have to confront those problems in the White House.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Connerly’s Anti Affirmative Action Measure Could be a Win-Win for McCain

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In 1998 Republican Presidential contender John McCain drew howls from conservatives when he opposed Senator Mitch McConnell’s federal transportation bill that would have replaced race- and gender-contracting set-asides with ones designed to help small businesses no matter the race or gender of the owner. But it was a Senate vote, and McCain’s vote passed way under the media and public’s radar scope. Most importantly for McCain, it was not a presidential election year. So McCain didn’t really gain or lose a whole lot by voting to keep racial preferences in place, at least at the federal level.
A decade later things are different, much different. McCain has deftly shifted gears and urges a “yes” vote on Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative action initiative on the Arizona ballot in November. McCain bets that this time pummeling affirmative action will do far more good than bad for his campaign. It’s a smart bet. A big opponent of Connerly’s barnstorming state campaigns to dump affirmative action, the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary candidly admits that the only way to beat back these initiatives is to keep them off ballots. That didn’t happen in California in 1996, in Washington in 1998 and in Michigan in 2006.
The anti-affirmative action initiatives won by solid even crushing margins in all three states. In the process, they galvanized public opinion, stirred subtle white resentment even anger against anything that smacked of racial preferences, and sent a big message that pushing affirmative action was a politically losing proposition. Michigan proved that. The two GOP candidates for governor and the Senate in the state opposed Connerly’s initiative. Both lost. But even more important the measure did not stir a mad dash by blacks, women, and Latinos to the barricades in Washington and Michigan to defeat the initiative. The lesson from the GOP candidate’s defeat and the relatively mild backlash to the initiative wasn’t lost on McCain.
At one point Connerly talked about taking his anti-affirmative action initiative fight to more than a dozen states. That hasn’t happened. But the number of states where Connerly dumped the initiative on the ballot isn’t important. What is important is the timing for placing the initiative on a state ballot and the states chosen to put it. Three states were picked for November. Nebraska is one. It’s a solid Red state, and almost certainly the initiative will win big there. election year or not. The other two states, Colorado and Arizona, are much more important. Democrats think that Colorado could for the first time in recent presidential bouts be in play for Obama. They think the same thing about McCain’s home state of Arizona. That’s mostly due to the big jump in the number of Hispanic and younger voters in these states. The Connerly initiative is just the thing to counter that by creating a mini wedge issue in both states that energizes conservatives too rush the polls to back the initiative and stick around long enough to back McCain.
That’s one political plus, but it’s not the only one. McCain can have it both ways on the issue. He can insist that he still strongly backs equal opportunity and just as strongly opposes discrimination. He can then make the standard anti-affirmative action pitch that he backs the Connerly initiative precisely because it strikes a blow against discrimination, namely racial preferences. And after all, isn’t everyone, and that even includes more than a few blacks, Latinos and especially Asians, against anything that smacks of racial unfairness?
There’s more still. Democratic rival Barack Obama appears to agree with McCain on this point. At first glance that seems a wild stretch. Connerly says Obama cut radio ads in 2006 hammering his Michigan anti-affirmative action initiative, and unabashedly saying that if it passed it would hurt women and minorities in getting jobs and in education. And he will oppose Connerly’s initiatives. But just as McCain wobbled in 1998 in opposing McConnell’s anti-affirmative action bill when it wasn’t a presidential election year. 2006 wasn’t a presidential election year either when Obama passionately defended affirmative action. 2008 is. He’s slightly wobbling on affirmative actions just as McCain did.
He has repositioned himself as a centrist Democrat and now flatly says he’s against quotas. That’s an easy call, since courts have repeatedly slapped down any affirmative action programs that mandate specific numbers of women or minorities be hired or admitted to colleges. But Obama wobbled even more when he says that the affirmative action measures should not be applied without taking into individual needs, and they should be applied to poor whites. The caution and even shading on how he speaks of affirmative action is a far cry from the ringing endorsement he gave to affirmative action for women and minorities.
It’s no real surprise. McCain aims to make Connerly’s initiative a political win-win for him. Obama aims to make sure that it’s not a total lose-lose for him.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

New Yorker Depicted Obama Horribly Wrong, but Got It Horribly Right about the Slanders
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

New Yorker Magazine’s under fire cover illustrator Barry Blitt says his infuriating cover was intended only to show that the incessant rumor that Obama is a closet terrorist is preposterous and ridiculous fear mongering. Team Obama’s rage at the inflammatory cover was beyond ballistic and nearly everyone with eyes and an opinion about it, and that included Republican rival John McCain, expressed the same ballistic anger at the New Yorker. But Blitt’s point that the ridiculous rumor mongering, gossip, slurs, and flat out falsities about Obama’s religion, patriotism, birth, and, of course race, are deep and widespread is horribly true. Even more frightening is that those slanders may touch a nerve in an unknown but frighteningly large number of voters. That danger was there from the start and there were packs of website ready to deepen that danger.

Obama had barely finished his announcement on the steps of the State Capitol at Springfield, Illinois in February, 2007 that he was in the hunt for presidency when the site Barack Exposed popped up on every search engine. The website was a put up job by Human Events, a fringe, ultraconservative outfit. It promised to expose the "truth" about Obama, from his alleged role in corruption scandals to doubletalk on the issues, and of course the signature hit item, his patriotism. At the time, it was rightly laughed off as a typical smear and slander by one of the pack of ultra-conservative hit squads.

The laughter didn’t last long. Obama’s breakout win in the Iowa Caucus in January instantly marked him as the potential Democrat's presidential go-to guy. It also set off alarm bells among the blog hit squads. Here’s a check list of the biggest, best known, and most virulent Obama dirt dealer sites that sprouted up after Iowa:
AntiObama.net AgainstObama.com AudacityOfHypocrisy.com BlockBarack.com ChicagoAgainstObama.com DontVoteObama.net DrNObama.comExposeObama.comInvestigateBarackObama.blogspot.com JustSayNoDeal.com MeetBarackObama.com No-bama.blogspot.com NobamaNetwork.comNobamaZone.comNoExperienceNoChange.org NoQuarterUSA.net ObamaBlog08.com Obama-Wire.comObamaism.Blogspot.com ObamaNation.comObamaTruth.org ObamaWho.wordpress.com ObamaWTF.blogspot.com Obamology.blogspot.com SavagePolitics.com SlickBarry.com Stop-Obama.org TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

The anti-Obama bile, complete with the scurrilous and phony doctored photos of Obama as a Muslim terrorist is the staple on many of the sites, and is repeated as a sickening mantra by the Obama character maligners. Obama’s White House bid has virtually breathed new life into the unabashedly white supremacist group Stormfront’s site (stormfront.org). The group claims to get about 40,000 hits a day

Google belatedly realized that its engine was rapidly becoming a top conduit for spreading the anti-Obama rumor mongering hate and shut down several of the more blatant anti-Obama sites. It sternly warned that any site that engaged in lathering Obama with vicious personal slurs would be promptly shut down. This drew some mild criticism that Google was stifling free speech, but the right to propagate malicious slander and lies hardly qualifies as a free speech protection, let alone legitimate political criticism.

There were early warning signals of the on-line ugliness that could come. Talk show gasser Rush Limbaugh took the first real swipe when he derisively sneered at Obama as the Magic Negro. Limbaugh kind of sort of backed away from it. But the message was that Obama was not exempt from a racial dig. That was much evident in the short-lived furor over Obama's former Southside Chicago church, and the controversial outbursts of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

The inference was that Obama's guilt by membership and friendship with him made him a closet radical and a race baiter. But long before the Wright controversy broke in the national media, more than a few of the above mentioned anti-Obama sites had a field day lambasting him and Wright.


The nitpicking continued on the most trivial things such as his chain smoking, his admitted flirt with drugs, and pokes at his wife, Michelle as outspoken, bossy and domineering, and America hating. This slander against her has been almost as popular on the sites as knocking Obama as unpatriotic and inferring he’s a closet Muslim terrorist.

The great danger is that the lies and maliciousness the Obama slander sites busily fan could or has had some resonance with some voters, especially the much fought over independents. They make up about one quarter of American electorate, and the overwhelming majority of them are white, and centrist to conservative in their views.

The fear that the rumors could hurt prompted Obama and the campaign to take the unprecedented step of putting up an anti-smear website to counter the lies. It also prompted Obama in January to do a teleconference call with Jewish reporters to refute the rumors that he was a Muslim.

New Yorker Magazine’s editors may well as the claim depicted Obama and Michelle as flag hating, unpatriotic, violent terrorists to show the absolute vileness and absurdity of the rampant slanders. But the magazine which is the nation’s staid, bastion of highbrow culture and thinking inadvertently or deliberately imprinted the damaging slanders in the thoughts of an even more unknown number of voters. The same as the legion of dirt dealing Obama blogs have done.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

Obama Never, Ever Said No to Bush on Iraq
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

"Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was. The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now."
Senator Barack Obama said that on December 12, 2007 in a speech in Clinton, Iowa. At the time he was still one of the pack of Democratic presidential candidates jostling and elbowing trying to get a knock out edge over the others for the Democratic presidential nomination. That included first and foremost Hillary Clinton. He mercilessly pounded her then and afterwards in speeches for backing the war and dutifully voting for war appropriations.
Nine months later things had radically changed. Obama was no longer jostling with Hillary and the others for the top Democratic presidential nominee spot. He was now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and he said this: "I have always said I would listen to the commanders on the ground. I have always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed.
His very public record of his very public pledge to end the war NOW in stump speeches the year before he said that had changed, and his words and voting record on the war had changed too. This has caused much grief, anguish and disappointment among fervent Obama backers. The war was the single biggest reason why many of them bought his sale that as president he would do what no other Democrat or Republican in the White House would do and that was to immediately end the war. That was more than enough for them to flock to his banner, lustily cheer him on, and furiously hector anyone who dared poke at his twists, turns, shifts, and deep knee bends on Iraq.
But even the most cursory look at Obama’s words, votes, and campaign pirouettes on Iraq paint a far different picture of a candidate for which Iraq was never the clear cut issue that many believed, or maybe wanted to believe. The Iraq flips started long before his Iowa pledge to get out now. It started even before he was in the Senate. At a Democratic forum outside Chicago during his Senate campaign in 2003 and 2004, Obama lambasted Bush for waging the war. He flatly said that if he had been in the Senate he would not have voted for $87 billion more to bankroll the war. Or, as he put it in an earlier speech, we have to say 'no' to George Bush." Once in the Senate that no quickly became yes.
He promptly voted for four separate war appropriations that totaled more than $300 billion. A year before he pledged in Iowa to get the troops out now, he opposed a proposal by Senator John F. Kerry to withdraw most combat troops from Iraq by July 2007. Obama didn’t just cast a quiet vote against Kerry’s troop removal proposal he added the veiled chastisement that an "arbitrary deadline" could "compound" the Bush administration's mistake. A year later he joined with Republicans and backed their resolution that the Senate would not cut off funding for troops in Iraq.
But money and votes aren’t the only issue in which Obama sent a different message then the impassioned get out of Iraq now speeches he still thundered before audiences. The other issue was when to withdraw. Obama backed up his end the war now rhetoric with another public demand that a firm timetable be set for withdrawal. In fact, a timetable with a specific withdrawal date was set by a Democratic senator. But that senator wasn’t Obama. It was Kerry. His bill set the goal of withdrawing combat troops from Iraq by the end of March 2008. In contrast, Obama’s withdrawal plan did not set firm deadlines and would keep troops in Iraq if the Bush administration and the Iraqi government met a laundry list of benchmarks.
March has long since passed, the troops are still there and big buck spending with the Senate’s approval continues with no visible end in sight to it.
Meanwhile Obama has added yet another wrinkle to his Iraq drama and that’s that he’ll go to Iraq and listen to what the commanders on the ground and military brass there have to say about where we need to go with the war.
This sounds less like the hard line one time verbal antiwar advocate named Obama speaking then a certain Republican presidential rival named McCain speaking. But then again Obama has been consistent from the start on one thing on Iraq and that’s political expediency.
Incidentally, some things at least rhetorically don’t change. An excerpt of Obama’s Iraq antiwar speech (cleansed of his Iraq war removal now call) is still on his official website. http://www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How the GOP Can Keep the White House, How the Democrats Can Take it Back (Middle Passage Press, August 2008).