Sen. Barack Obama has joined a long list of candidates for the 2008 presidential race. He also is leading the Dem scramble to be the most anti-Iraq war.
However, he started his campaign with an “inarticulate” gaff.
A crowd of his supporters cheered wildly when Obama trashed the Iraq war. However, his most outrageous assertion was that the Iraq war “has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”
He then quickly backpedaled in an interview with the Des Moines Register to clarify what he actually meant.
“…What I meant to say was those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership that would give them a clear mission.”
Read the story via The Chicago Sun-Times titled “Obama regrets saying soldiers’ lives ‘wasted’” here.
In Spite of Obama’s doublespeak, I now feel better that the Illinois Senator once again is “articulate”.
For more on this, check out Michelle Malkin’s post titled “Obama tries to remove foot from mouth…” here.
Dan England’s posts can also be found at Getting Elected Blogline and Townhall. Dan’s website is GettingElected.com and he is the author of So You Want to Run for Political Office and Welcome to the Real Corporate World.
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1 user commented in " Barack Obama: Inarticulate Gaff "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackDon’t you think it’s kind of strange to focus on the slight inaccuracy of a person’s comments in a speech, given that most of what we say is inaccurate, overgeneralized, etc.? Think about it…it is very hard to speak the exact truth all of the time, and for the purposes of expediency, concision, etc., we illogically overgeneralize. Obama’s statement, that 3,000 lives have been “wasted”, is just such an overgeneralization, but if you, like Obama, have consistently opposed the war from the beginning because you don’t think it was worth fighting, then it is at least a truism that many lives have been “wasted”. Where the inaccuracy comes, as critics rightly (though hypocritically) point out, is in implying that all of those lives have been wasted. Even if the policy is wrong, and the war is wrong, it does not imply that all of the soldiers died for nothing. Some of them might have died protecting their friends, or civilians, for instance. But it is a truism, if you are against the war, that the lives of thousands of soldiers has been wasted.
I have yet to see a really substantive, specific criticism of Obama coming from the Right at least; I have seen a lot of pointless nitpicking though, and I suppose this will continue, as those who lack substantive criticism must resort to such tactics.
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