Well, he comes across as very schizophrenic on the issue. One day, you're Bush-lite if you don't support talking to Ahmadinejad without preconditions, and the next day, well of course I'd never talk to Hamas unless they renounced terrorism. Heck, I wasn't in favor of talking to the IRA, but somehow we resolved that situation.
I'm more liberal than you are on these issues, and I try to avoid criticizing candidates for taking liberal positions, but God, at least have the guts to defend the position! Standard Democratic behavior is to take a liberal position and then spend the rest of your life trying to back away from it. I hate it.
I don't believe talking to these dictators one on one at the presidential level is a liberal policy .
I don't think he himself believed in his position , it just happened to fall in line with his new kind of politics within the democratic primary with a substantial number of folks who believed it .
In a general election he would have to find a way to defend his position which is all on tape on several occasions.
That kind of policy defies common sense and it would probably not be helpful in the general.
He is trying to back away from it now and that would cause him more grief because all you have to do is run the ads of him saying.
It's liberal in the sense that one end of the spectrum says "war is always the best solution" and the other end says "diplomacy is always the best solution." Obviously when I call myself a liberal I'm not saying that I go all the way to the polar extreme.
I felt both Clinton and Obama were guilty of a little political opportunism on the original debate question. I felt Obama was basically articulating the mainstream Democratic position - we'll try to find a non-military solution if we can - and Hillary was doing a bit of point-scoring by making it sound like he really, literally agreed with every aspect of the question and would meet with all these people in his first year with zero preconditions. In other words, I thought Obama was addressing the spirit of the question and Hillary was holding him to the letter.
But then Obama actually decided to stick to his guns, and stand by the answer 100% as he called Hillary "Bush-lite" for disagreeing! I was really surprised that he did this, as the literal answer is, as you say, an indefensible position. I consider it a political weakness of Obama's, the inability to choose his battles more carefully. It's like the flag pin thing, a completely self-inflicted wound that he didn't have to let happen.
You are right he got tangled up in that debate , of course Hillary Clinton played her part in it .
I remember his camp actually rejected the implication immediately after the debate at an attempt at damage control , after days of attacks , he realized he had an opportunity in the primary to turn it into his new kind of politics thing.
He even said he wasn't afraid to lose a PR war to the dictators at a rally .
In terms of the liberal policy thing I understand what you are saying , but what I am pointing out is I don't think there would be too many serious liberal foreign policy thinkers out there that would advocate the president meeting personally one on one without preconditions with these guys , you can do that at a lower cabinet level , but to suggest the president should do that is startling to me.
The flagpin was a no brainer , not a fight he should have picked at all.
