Yesterday, Barack Obama explained what he wants Congress to do with the next appropriations bill for Iraq. The AP offered a short summary and a two-sentence quote.
Despite the Iraq war’s unpopularity, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Thursday that Congress lacks the votes to force a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops and will focus instead on putting a ceiling on the number deployed.
“One way of ending the war would be setting a timetable. We’re about 15 votes short. Right now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that many votes,” Obama said, referring to the number needed to override an expected veto by President Bush.
This was hardly encouraging. The debate is barely underway, Dems hope to keep the pressure on Republicans, and if the AP account was right, Obama was practically conceding defeat before the political struggle even began in earnest.
Several leading progressive blogs pounced, explaining why we expect better from the senator.
Unfortunately, the AP account wasn’t right.
Here’s what Obama actually said.
I tell you what. I think that we want to get everybody on board to bring this war to a close…I want to be honest with you about where we are in Congress right now. We are gonna’ have a series of debates about funding the next phase of this war. And there are gonna’ be a couple of options.
One option is to just give the president a blank check, and to say ‘whatever you say Mr. President here, you keep on doing what you’re doing.’ I don’t think that is an acceptable option. Right now the question — one way of ending the war would be to impose a timetable where we would have all our combat troops out. And I had a bill that provided that timetable of March 30 th. We passed it with a majority voting for that in the Senate and in the House but the problem was the president vetoed that bill and to overcome a veto in the senate you gotta’ have 67 votes so were about 15 votes short. We were hoping to persuade enough Republican senators and Republican representatives to change their positions in order to override the President’s veto. And ill be honest with you right now, it doesn’t look like were going to get that many votes, but I think it’s important for everybody here to put pressure on Republican congressmen and Senators who have not recognized that were on a failed course so that we can at least see more votes on that bill.
The other thing that were also gonna’ try to do – I don’t know if everybody’s aware of this but those people who have been sent to Iraq have been on the kinds of rotations without rest and without proper training that the army itself says is unacceptable. We have people who are spending more time in Iraq than they are back home retraining and getting the rest that they need. And so what we’re going to try to introduce is legislation that says you have to at least give people a one year break for every year served in Iraq. And if were able to get that passed, and get sixty votes for that, then at least that would put a ceiling on how many troops could be sent there at any given time. So those are some of the approaches that were gonna’ try to take even before George Bush leaves office, but all that is going to require some pressure from all of you on our senators and your congressman, you know, who are really important.
He wasn’t accepting a defeat; he was trying to rally support for a change in policy. The AP’s account was largely backwards. As Kos put it, “[I]t wasn’t so much ‘resignation,’ as it was ‘help us change this.'”
I suspect this is going to happen quite a bit in the coming months. When you hear a Dem saying something that doesn’t sound right, the rule should probably be, wait for the transcript.