Hoping for Audacity

Sen. Barack Obama penned an op-ed in today’s Manchester Union-Leader in which he names names:

Sen. Clinton says she was merely voting for more diplomacy, not war with Iran. If this has a familiar ring, it should. Five years after the original vote for war in Iraq, Sen. Clinton has argued that her vote was not for war — it was for diplomacy, or inspections. But all of us knew what the Senate was debating in 2002. John Edwards has renounced his own vote for the war, and he should be applauded for his candor. After all, we didn’t need to authorize a war in order to have United Nations weapons inspections. No one thought Congress was debating diplomacy. No newspaper headlines ran on Oct. 12, 2002, reading, “Congress authorizes diplomacy.” This was a vote to authorize war, and without that vote, there would have been no war.

The op-ed, which is intended to paint contrasts between Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, skillfully folds the past into arguments about the present and future. Could this be the candidate his fans have been waiting for?

The Clinton campaign responded by attacking Obama for going negative, thereby “abandoning the politics of hope.” And then the Obama campaign countered by claiming Clinton had abandoned ” the politics of ‘let’s chat’ and ‘let’s have a conversation’” by allowing “tough questions on important issues like Iran” to irritate her.

If this marks a new tack for the Illinois Senator’s campaign, it is an astute one. The contrasts are intended to portray differences about the present and the future, rather than the past. But every chance Obama gets, he explains that such differences exist now, and that he isn’t just nitpicking Clinton’s five-year-old vote in favor of the Iraq War, serving to remind voters of it without looking petty. The “old politics” versus “new politics” narrative has finally begun to serve Obama in some small way, because commentators make the “old politics” argument (the Iraq War vote) for him every time he makes the “new politics” one (about “the future” or, more specifically, Iran). Or at least that’s how it sounds, even if the Clinton camp will argue that any attack of any kind is “old politics.”

Here’s how Obama explained it on CNN’s Situation Room: