Sometimes the press has to call horsepuckey on a candidate, and this is one of those times.
Obama in the New York Times today:
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to emphasize, as he and his aides have done continually over the last few days, the difference between avoiding preconditions for talks with nations like Iran and Syria, and granting them automatic discussions at the presidential level.
While Mr. Obama has said he would depart from the Bush administration policy of refusing to meet with certain nations unless they meet preconditions, he has also said he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all.
To their credit, the Times notes:
“Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” asked Stephen Sixta, a video producer who submitted the question for the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.
Mr. Obama, the first candidate to respond, answered, “I would.”
They also point out, “Even after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called his position naïve, Mr. Obama refused to shy away from it, at times speaking explicitly in terms of a potential meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.” But the Times doesn’t mention that the YouTube questioner included video images of the leaders of those countries, including Ahmadinejad. It is impossible to dispute who Sixta had in mind when he said, “the leader of Iran” in his question.
But what’s more, Obama’s backtracking comes just as Matt Yglesias’ Atlantic article praising his bold, clear, and unequivocal position hits the stands:
Few observers believed that Obama genuinely intended to break new ground with his response—his campaign had never articulated any such policy before, and seemed ill-prepared to defend it on the spot. The Clinton campaign dutifully pressed the attack the next day, calling Obama’s statement “irresponsible and frankly naive.” But then a funny thing happened. Obama’s team did not try to qualify (or, in political parlance, “clarify”) his remark, and no one said he misspoke. Instead, the campaign fought back, with memos to reporters and with a speech by the candidate himself, aimed squarely at the sort of “conventional wisdom” that had, in the words of his then-foreign-policy adviser, Samantha Power, “led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy.”
In the YouTube debate, the answer — the answer that Ygleisias rather persuasively argues defines the distinction between his view and Hillary — is clear: “I would.”
Today the answer is, “he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all.”
It’s almost as if one answer is designed to win votes in the primary, and another answer is designed to win votes in the general election…