One-Upmanship on Senate Floor
WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 19, 2007 — -- Last week anti-war liberals, a key part of the Democratic base, made it known that they were not pleased that neither Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., nor Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., came out in favor of trying to stop the president's proposed troop surge to Iraq.
This week everything changed and the one-upmanship began.
Former Sen. John Edwards, another potential presidential candidate, threw down the gauntlet Sunday, in a speech in Harlem, attacking fellow Democrats for their timidity in refusing to try to stop the escalation of troops.
"Silence is betrayal. Speak out," Edwards told the cheering crowd. "Tell your elected leaders to block this misguided plan that is destined to cost more money and more American lives."
Tuesday, when Obama announced his presidential exploratory committee, he made sure to remind voters that he would never have voted for the Iraq War to begin with -- unlike Edwards and Clinton.
"We're still mired in a tragic and costly war that should have never been waged," Obama said in a video statement on his Web site.
On Wednesday -- the same day that another presidential hopeful, Sen Chris Dodd, D-Conn., introduced a bill to cap troop levels -- Clinton suddenly declared she would try to stop the president's troop surge by introducing forceful legislation to cap troop levels and require that benchmarks be met by both the Iraqi government and the Bush administration.
"We will eventually have to move to tougher requirements on the administration to get their attention," she said.
Within minutes of Clinton's announcement, Obama e-mailed a statement to the media and said he supported not only a cap on troops but also a phased deployment of troops out of Iraq. "The fact that the president is already moving ahead with this idea is a terrible consequence of the decision to give him the broad, open-ended authority to wage this war in 2002," the Obama statement read.
Thursday, Obama took the Senate floor to announce his own plan, which contained that cap on troops.
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