Obama Comes Right Back

Good stuff.

Look, one thing I'm very confident about is my judgment in foreign policy is, I believe, better than anyone else in this race, Republican or Democrat.

"And I don't base that simply on the fact that I was right on the war in Iraq. But if you look at how I approached the problem. What I was drawing on was a set of experiences that come from a life of living overseas, having family overseas, being able to see the world through the eyes of people outside our borders.

"The notion that somehow from Washington you get this vast foreign policy experience is illusory.

In fact, that Washington bubble may give an inverse amount of wisdom regarding foreign policy, because it sets up a consensus, completely out of the ether, to which you have to conform.

I mean, Washington approaches to foreign policy problems bring us things like consulting advertising experts to improve the military's "brand" in Iraq. And making idiotic compromises like "how about 70,000 troops to do the job 150,000 troops can't." And rubbing their chins and assenting to consistent moving of goalposts to disassociate with those dirty fucking hippies that want out of Iraq yesterday.

The Washington consensus has given us an unaccountable, imperial President who takes full advantage of their laziness and general hatred of hippies to take vast new powers for himself. Any resemblance to what the Founders intended in the Constitution is completely out the window at this point.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”

Read the whole thing. Obama, at least, is coming from a completely different place than these wise men of Washington, who have damaged this country through their cheerleading for a despot.

UPDATE: Obama had more to say and hit directly at Clinton and her judgment:

"The general principle that I was laying out is that we should not be afraid as America to meet with anybody.

"Now, they may not like what we want to hear -- so if I’m talking to the President of Iran, I’m going to inform him that Israel is our stalwart ally, and we are going to do what's necessary to protect them -- that we will not accept a nuclear bomb in Iran, but that doesn’t mean we can’t say that face to face. And obviously, the diplomatic state work has to be done ahead of time.

"But the general principle is one that I think Senator Clinton is wrong on -- and that is if we are laying out preconditions that prevents us from speaking frankly to these folks, then we are continuing with Bush-Cheney policies, and I am not interested in continuing that.

"I know that she has said in the past that we have to talk to our enemies -- well that’s what this is about. And if we say that we will not talk to them unless they meet a series of preconditions, then that’s the same position that Bush and Cheney have maintained over the last six years, and it has made us less safe. And that’s what I think is going to be a significant part of this debate in 2008 [...]

That ultimately is what’s going to create the environment in which we can reduce some of the threat levels we are facing. To fail to do that is the same conventional Washington thinking that led many including Senator Clinton to go ahead with the war without having asked adequate questions."

The Clinton team is very experienced but they are a group of consummate insiders. So are some of Obama's team, actually, but the mere presence of Samantha Power gives him a leg up. And he is absolutely right to link Hillary Clinton with Iraq, the Washington Elites, and insiderism. That's a winning message.