HRC vs BHO on foreign policy….go!

K. It’s late, I’m sick and I just popped a few generic tylenol PMs, so I’m gonna bang out my thoughts on Obama and Clinton’s position on foreign policy:

• All those Democrats who are super excited about cluster bombs and land mines, please stand up. OK, thanks Hillary Clinton. Anyone else? Not many, I’d guess, because most Democrats find them repellent.
• An aggressive posture against Iran? Check, thanks in part to HRC. Obama was a no-show for that vote (don’t even start), although he says he would have voted against it; that would be in line with his tendency to prefer assertive diplomacy backed with a credible military threat instead of the perfunctory diplomacy head-fakes of the past 7 years.
• Do I use the word “perfunctory” a lot. My guess: yeah.
• Howard Dean tried to shove the party in a bit more of a “talk first” direction back in 2004… dude was pissed and righteous — if a bit of a hothead — and I was a huge fan. Obama is saying a lot of the same things, but he’s way more careful in how he says things.
• To my way of thinking, HRC hasn’t fallen into some kind of hawkish position by painting herself into a CYA corner — she’s genuinely belligerent (for a Democrat) when it comes to foreign policy. You can see this in her foreign policy staff (Albright, Holbrooke, Berger, yuck), and the contrast with BHO’s staff (Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, Samantha Power) is clear enough.

Any questions? I had a lot more thoughts in the shower, that’s all I got right now.

Oh, one more thing: For the record, I don’t expect BHO to actually be some kind of Messiah when/if he gets elected. He’s got a number of positions and political strategies that are really wrong:

• No health care mandate in his plan, and to make matters worse he’s running a pretty clear Republican line against HRC’s (better) plan: ooooh, that scary government is gonna garnish your wages, etc. This is bad policy and bad politics. (Now, it would be smarter politics if he’d casually mention the different while running against HRC and make a big deal of it while running against McCain. It’s a political strategy to win Independent votes, not a club to use against HRC.)
• The “campaigning with the anti-gay bigot” thing was pretty goddam offensive.
• Gee, I thought I had more complaints.
• Oh, of course it would be great if he ran more explicitly on his progressive agenda. It is troubling that a lot of his supporters can’t rattle off the first 5 things he wants to do when he gets in office. (Climate change, start pulling troops back, health care, ethics reform, “the economy”, possibly in that order. That’s my guess, without, ya know, going to the website. Other contenders: immigration reform and education.) Ok, after checking the doc, it looks like ethics reform is number one; all other changes have to come after that one, thus the candidate of “CHANGE”… change the system or nothing happens.
• Starting every sentence in an interview with “Look,” gets old. Change we can believe in starts there, plzkthxbai.

Whew, I’m sleepy now. That Psycho screenshot didn’t quite wake me up.