In a lengthy piece by Spencer Ackerman He shows why foreign policy would be very different with Obama as president than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
These two paragraphs provide a nice summary of the differences between Obama and Clinton/McCain:
Most of the members of Obama’s foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. “No one [of Obama’s critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take,” recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama’s foreign-policy speeches. “And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, ‘No, I’m right about this!'”
Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. “This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it’s about moving beyond it. And we’re not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq,” Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama’s comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, “He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it’s a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that’s wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics.”
This is also why Obama would be a good if not great president he is willing to challenge the dogma that led to the Iraq debacle. Where John McCain probably created the Dogma and Hillary Clinton seems to believe it, Obama has the political courage to challenge the bad neo-con ideas. Obama also seems to have the political skill to explain why he is taking a position and convince a majority of Americans that he is right. Not an easy task when you have guys like Limbaugh and O’Rielly spewing moronic crap on radio as well as TV 24/7.
Obama is definitely the right person to lead the country at this time.