ATTENTION ALL LIBERALS

I’ve been listening to your voices lately about the Presidential candidates. I hear that you believe Giuliani is the best of the Republican bunch, for example. And I sense that some of you like Hillary, and maybe even more of you like Edwards, especially after he and his wife appeared this week to announce that their passion for the campaign will go on, despite cancer.

I am not posting today to criticize Giuliani as the best potential GOP Presidential candidate in quite some time. I am not posting today to call Hillary Clinton a future totalitarian dictator, as was suggested in that now-famous You-Tube video. And I am certainly not posting to criticize Edwards’ announcement about his wife’s cancer, which shows an incredible amount of positive thinking – the kind that I’m way too neurotic even to begin to fathom. So yes, if you have to choose who to vote for between Edwards and me, choose the guy with the Southern accent.

BUT … and it’s a big butt … I did want to point out one tiny thing about another candidate in the race. Maybe it isn’t important. Maybe what’s important is whether a candidate has spent years thinking through a seventeen-point plan on immigration reform, or a twenty-point plan on health-care reform, or a thirty-five point plan on energy policy. (Isn’t that what people know as “substance” – the ability to spew out programmatic ideas on those topics with the same facility that most us of urinate?)

What? Did I hear you say that “substance” refers to something different? It involves showing passion for an issue that really matters to the candidate? Issues like how to help children, in the case of Hillary Clinton, or how to help the poor, in the case of John Edwards? Fine. I for one have often said that there is no issue more important to me than eradicating poverty as much as possible. And yet … I made those statements during peacetime. When war is threatened, so too are needs even more basic than the right to liberty or the pursuit of happiness. I’m talking about the right to life … and I don’t have in mind the life of a fetus. I’m talking about the life of already-born human beings.

So, with that intro in mind, my liberal friends, I give you a link to a speech that Barack Obama gave in October 2002 at a rally against the Iraq War, at the same time that Hillary and John were preparing to vote in favor of the war, a war they never spoke out against until after “facts on the ground” went south. If you think this speech is less important than who has the best forty-two point plan on international trade … I guess I’m not quite sure any more what it means to be a liberal.

http://www.barackobama.com/2002/10/26/remarks_of_illinois_state_sen.php