Obama: Clean Break With the Past or Carter-esque Naivete?
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)
Photo: U.S. Senate
First is a published report about the 300-person foreign policy team Obama has created. The relevance of this "news" is deftly debunked by my friend Charlie Brown at the Undiplomatic blog. The second is news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki supports Obama's approach to the war in Iraq. Both of these issues will provide great fodder for the horde of American journalists in the Obama world tour caravan.
By most conventional measures of an American presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama's foreign policy credentials are light. He has served four years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and made several overseas trip, including a much covered visit to Africa in 2006. But beyond that there are few professional experiences which have informed his views of the world. He doesn't have the direct experiences of... Read more.
Comments
We have been almost destroyed by so called
experience these last 7 1/2 years.
Give ma a person with integrity, intelligence, diplomacy, one who listens to
and HEARS others,cares and understands we
need drastic change in the leadership of
our country for survival of our country,
anyday.
The republicans have failed and have
almost detroyed our country with their
failures. Mccain would be more of the
same. We cannot let that happen.
How about focusing on who has the experience, judgement and character to protect us and bring prosperity to Americans … not someone who in the eleventh hour, finally tries to establish foreign policy credentials, in a one week visit, as a transparent political ploy to get himself elected. Where was Obama, when he was supposed to chair the congressional committee on Afghanistan, and never had a single meeting. Why did Obama vote ‘present’ over 100 times in the senate? Even if he stages a political rally in the Roman Coliseum, he’s still just an inexperienced politician, who is not qualified to be President of the United States of America !!!
Looking back over all our presidents, few had much foreign experience and many had next to none, including Reagan and George Bush. Nixon and George H. W. Bush probably had the most of all presidents at the time of election, including Franklin Roosevelt. So, there are other criteria for judging the qualifications of presidential candidates. The prime ones must be vision, and I would say, perspective. In these categories, I evaluate Sen. Obama as having unique life experiences and background that just might be quite advantageous. Whereas, it should have been clear during George Bush’s first presidential campaign that he not only had no foreign experience, but more importantly, he also harbored a provincial mindset. Still, realistically we will not know what we get until the candidate, whichever is elected, has appointed his foreign-affairs advisers and Sec. of State and is tested while in office.