As the only leading Democratic presidential candidate to oppose the Iraq war from the beginning, Sen. Barack Obama is hoping to win over anti-war liberals who dominate primary elections.
Unlike Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards, who voted for the war in October 2002, Obama spoke out that same month in opposition to the war, which began in March 2003.
“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined costs, with undetermined consequences,” he told an anti-war rally of 2,000 people in Chicago’s Federal Plaza.
“I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.”
Although it took years for Edwards and Clinton to gradually turn against the war, Obama now says he knew even before the conflict began that President Bush’s motives were not pure.
“I sensed,” he wrote in a memoir last year, “the administration’s rationales for war were flimsy and ideologically driven.”
Obama portrays himself as speaking out against the war at some political risk, noting that “friends warned me against taking so public a position on such a volatile issue.”
But now that the Iraq war has become almost universally unpopular among Democrats and even some Republicans, Obama’s early opposition has become “an advantage” because it’s “what people want to hear,” said Democratic strategist MaryAnne Marsh.
“He is unencumbered by a vote on going to war in Iraq,” she said. “In politics, sometimes it is better to be lucky than good — and this might be an example of it.”
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for politics, agreed.
“Democratic activists are going to like the Obama position on the war better than the other two,” he said. “It’s a clean anti-war position.
“Between Edwards and Clinton, activists will prefer Edwards because he has issued a full-throated retraction of his vote in favor of the war,” he added. “Clinton continues to be reluctant to say ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I was wrong.’ ”
But Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report, said voters might no longer care about that distinction.
“My hunch is where you are on Iraq is more important than where you were,” he said. “Clinton needed to make the turn on Iraq. She has. So I don’t think it is a huge problem for her.”
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