Wishy-washy Obama.  He offered the same general guidelines as in Hillary's plan but without the teeth.

Bo-ring Bo-ring Bo-ring

I just have one question for Barack Obama...

WHERE'S THE BEEF?

another one. did you read the post about edwards opportunistic remarks at this forumn? where's the beef is too easy to scream out. write a paragraph yourself to show your BEEF about your criticism.

The supplemental was co-opted from Obama's original bill.

i wouldn't give all the credit to him but it says a lot about him(whether he's open to good ideas or that he's a good legislator) that the final supplemental was similar to his bill.

soo....

I think he did a good job reframing his screwup with the AP.  He messed up, he realized it and he then corrected it.  I'm glad to see it... He has had a good week of learning from past mistakes.  All candidates will make them, its whether they repeatedly do it or they learn from them.  Obama is showing he is learning from them.

Waiting to do anything until we find 16 Republicans?  That's the Obama Plan?  That's basically saying we won't do anything until January 2009.  Nope, send the bill back with Reid-Feingold defunding the war over a year and get the 51 votes of the Democrats.  Let the Republicans own this war.  Tie them on to the anchor that is Bush and sweep into vast majorities in the House, Senate and win the White House!

Tough question about supporting only a supplemental ONLY with a timeline. Wants to try to find 67 votes to override the veto

I'm gonna go quote that out of the transcript real quick:

Assuming he vetoes the bill--I'm committed to finding the 67 votes we need to override this veto. I would support putting conditions on the next version of the legislation if we can't muster 67 votes.

Okay, so here's why Obama was complaining about playing Chicken with the white house: he wants to play Shoot the Moon instead.

I wonder if he's really serious about accumulating a veto override, or has any plans to make the veto override happen... or if he's just throwing the veto override out as a feel-good wishful-thinking way of avoiding having to take a more realistic and thus more difficult stance on Iraq.

If he means it, even aside from what it would mean to America's involvement in Iraq, it would make things in the presidential race awfully interesting; trying to form or lead a coalition toward an override would be the kind of unique leadership-type thing that Obama actually is in a position to attempt before the elections, and if he somehow was able to somehow engineer or take credit for a batch of Republican defections that passed the supplemental then that would fantastically increase his standing in both of the elections he'd have to win next year to become President. Even if it didn't work, as long as he tried, got close and made enough noise in the process to ratchet up the pressure on Bush and the holdout senators, it would be an awfully gutsy move. Even a failed charge toward an override, were Obama at the helm, would put Obama far ahead of any other current candidate in being able to say he did something toward ending the war.

But, of course, actually pulling it off would be impossible, and it seems hard to believe Obama really meant it. Bush isn't popular among his own party right now, and a lot of those Senatorial Republicans seemed awfully friendly to the ideas in the supplemental back when they were called "Baker-Hamilton", but... 17 votes? I mean, seriously, where would they come from? A week or two ago it briefly seemed almost beyond plausibility for the supplemental to to scrounge together two senators, much less 19.

I think you're listening with too-heavily biased ears. I understand that we all have our favorites, but

A. Obama said things that were pretty different from Hillary, like the idea that we should withdraw all combat troops by March 2008, and that he wanted to override Bush's veto.

and

B. Edwards is clearly on the anti-war side now, but if you want to complain about candidates not saying what THEY'd do about Iraq, you should be complaining about your man, since he spent his whole time talking about what CONGRESS (which he's not in anymore) should do now, and not much (if anything) about what he'd do if elected in 2009. I happen to like Edwards in general, but I wish he's stop playing this game of trying to link his Democratic opponents to the war (which is what he's trying to do, make no mistake).

Looks like McCain is returning fire.

I hope Democrats in Congress will heed the advice of one of their leading candidates for President, Senator Obama, and immediately pass a new bill to provide support to our troops in Iraq without substituting their partisan interests for those of our troops and our country.

Obama needs to get on that quick.