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THEN AGAIN... Contra my assertion that Barack Obama hasn't been a leader on any contentious issue and Tom's lament this morning, Frank Rich made a solid point in his column yesterday. Says Rich,
[I]t's important to remember that on one true test for his party, Iraq, he was consistent from the start. On the long trail to a hotly competitive senatorial primary in Illinois, he repeatedly questioned the rationale for the war before it began, finally to protest it at a large rally in Chicago on the eve of the invasion. He judged Saddam to pose no immediate threat to America and argued for containment over a war he would soon label "dumb" and politcal-driven." He hasn't changed. In his new book he gives a specific date (the end of this year) for beginning "a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops and doesn't seem to care who calls it "cut and run."While one could quibble that Obama isn't leading any actual withdrawal resolutions on the Senate floor at the moment, the point stands. While so many in his party were afraid to confront the president over Iraq before the war, Obama, then an obscure African-American state senator running for statewide office in the Midwest, was not afraid to speak his mind when a pollster might have told him to shut up. Needless to say, he has been vindicated, and doesn't let his ambitions for higher office lead him to hem and haw about it now either. When compared to pro-war senators like Joe Biden and Evan Bayh he would face in the primary should he decide to run in 2008, Obama may be earning the liberal leader mantle he will carry after all.
--Ben Adler
