UPDATE: To complete the transformation, Obama’s website has been scrubbed clean of his earlier comments about the surge. Down the memory hole as they say in 1984.
One would never know from this op-ed today in the NY Times, that Obama stated that the surge would never work and “would in fact make things worse.” He does serve one useful purpose. I’m sure that he scares the serious Iraqis who want a successful self-government into working faster to get ready for the day when Obama cuts out on them. In Januray, 2007, Obama said I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.
Now he says In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.
What say ?
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
This, of course, is a lie. He opposed the surge because he thought it wouldn’t work. Or, he was lying then. Or maybe he is lying both times.
Of course it took some rewriting of history to get his career going.
It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama’s seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.
Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor’s office as well as both legislative chambers.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Read the rest. It’s interesting. He is a made man in the truest sense of the term. Also, the 2002 event that changed Illinois politics was the drivers’ license scandal that drove the governor from office.