June 29, 2008

I understand that Obama is going to move to the center during the general. It's a fairly common practice even if I disagree with it, but to go after MoveOn which supported him so strongly is a bit much.

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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday, in a major speech on patriotism, criticized MoveOn.org for referring to Gen. David Petraeus as General Betray Us last year.
The Illinois senator said politics too often seems "trapped in old, threadbare arguments" that he called "caricatures of left and right." The Democrat argued that "given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions."

MoveOn.org, a powerful left-of-center interest group, endorsed Obama in the Democratic presidential race.
"None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely; after all, when we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be," Obama stated in his speech from Independence, Mo. "But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism."
Obama also said that he would "never question the patriotism of others in this campaign." The senator made clear, however, that he would "not stand idly by when I hear others question mine."

I agree completely that he has to stand up strong against the smears that are coming and have been raining down on him by the right so far. And we haven't seen nothin' yet. We all want him to win very badly in the fall, but he's moving much more to the right than I would have thought this early.

And he rebukes Gen. Wesley Clark.

Sure enough, just as I was about to publish this blog post, I got an email from Obama spokesman Bill Burton: "As he's said many times before, Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain's service, and of course he rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark." So much for Vice President Clark.

UPDATE: Take our AOL Hot Seat Poll on whether Obama was justified in criticizing MoveOn and Clark below the fold

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Wesley Clark responds here...

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