In a statement rare among Democrats, he declared “we all have the greatest interest seeing a successful resolution to Iraq.” The party line is that Iraq is a “quagmire” or (Clinton’s words) a “failed policy.”

Obama opposed the war from the beginning, but once our troops were in Iraq, he supported the best outcome.

Hillary voted for the war but turned sour on it once it failed and became unpopular.

I'm just glad someone else saw the beauty of his logical maneuvers at the hearing. It also, in my mind, made him look the most "presidential" of the candidates by asking questions that drove to the real gist of the topic.

He'll be excellent in cabinet meetings.

that harvard education and his teaching skills were definitely at play. obama efficiently laid the groundwork for his rebuttal to mccain's wars stance. it was brilliant!

hrc delivered a speech and well mccain? no comment.

I was struck that Obama was doing what an executive would do: "I'm going to be making decisions on this, so it's time to start drilling down on the details on which those decisions must be made." If the buck stops with you, you've got to get to your bottom line.

The other two were speechifying.

"When I saw that the idiot pundits missed how intelligent it was, if I ever doubted the stupidity of the pundit class, I certainly no longer do. "

The pundits really are stupider than we all thought. They have the emotional and intellectual level of a junior high student. Perhaps I'm being too generous.

Obama's problem is that he is probably too smart and it goes over their head. Clinton and McCain talk on the crass, simpleminded level that the punditocracy can relate to. They get it.

Just watched the Obama videos; had missed his testimony.

I think we're all in awe of Obama because of something that really shouldn't be considered all that remarkable. It's just that it's been absent from our government lo these many years, and we rarely see it done so well.

Obama was trying to focus his intelligence and that of Crocker, Petraeus and committee members on a pragmatic search based on hard facts for a specific attainable solution. Obama didn't ask "gotcha" questions. He didn't spout talking points. He talked about the problems we actually face in Iraq, not some latter-day crusade against evil.

It was nice that he didn't beat up Petraeus and Crocker for trying to implement Bush's policies. That's their job; setting the policies is Bush's job. You can envision Obama taking advantage of what these two men have actually learned on the scene even though they learned it working for Bush.

It's also notable that Obama referenced the previous contributions to the discussion made by others on the committee. It was as though Obama was working, not performing. There was no grandstanding, no claim to having a quick fix from his own brilliant mind. What Obama conveyed to the group was, "We're all in this together, and together we can figure out the best way to deal with it from this point forward."

In short, Obama gave us a glimpse of his approach to problem-solving in action. You can actually solve problems that way. Works much better than deriving solutions with ideological formulas like the Soviets of old or Bush and Cheney now. That's because you work out the solution before you decide what to do. Big difference from starting with the Decisions of the Decider, resplendent in their moral clarity, and quickly finding them at odds with reality. No cult of personality here.

I noticed from the first time I heard Senator Obama speak that he is at a level of development where he truly has the capacity to hold paradoxes... hold all of the realities.. and use them to bring solutions or new ideas to the surface or to work with others to do this same thing... he does not have to get distracted in on paradox such as our need for security over another such as our desire for liberty... He can hold them both and let the tensions lead to the solutions..

Problems cannot be solved on the same level that they are created... or often they cannot be solved by he same people that created them for this very reason... their thinking has not evolved enough to transcend and include the problem...

We are truly fortunate that someone like Senator Obama has arrived on the scene willing to lead this country with all of the challenges we are facing...

I really hope that the people of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina push his nomination forward so that we can focus on winning the general election and what we are going to have to do to move our economy in a realistic and healthier direction...

I had the sense when I was watching Sen. Obama at the hearing that this is how a President works: He questions, he probes, he listens to the answers, he adjusts his next questions according to the answers received, etc. etc. It was at once fascinating and reassuring: This is how he'll work. And you know what? I trust this guy.

"His standard seems to be “a messy, sloppy status quo but (where) there’s not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there’s still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it’s not a threat to its neighbors and it’s not an al-Qaida base.”

Kondracke is wrong on that. Seemed to me Obama was trying to get an answer from Patreus about what metrics they were using to judge Iraq and couldn't get a straight answer so he started throwing stuff out there. He asked if Iraqi forces could sustain what's going on now would that be enough. I don't remember Patreus answering.

At the risk of repeating myself,

OBAMA! BECAUSE BRAINS MATTER

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/03/obama-because-brains-matter.php

Obama didn’t, to his credit, say that no political progress had been achieved using the surge’s “breathing room.” He just said it “has not been taken the way we all would like it.”

David Brooks, Tuesday:

"At this week’s hearings on Capitol Hill, Democrats will declare that the surge has not produced political progress and therefore the whole thing is for naught. That’s wrong. There has been political progress. It just doesn’t look the way we expected it to."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/opinion/08brooks.html

The cynical me could say this is all politics, that Obama is trying to triangulate on Iraq (with a view to a head-to-head with McCain).

The perhaps naive me, who does not see Obama as a typically cynical politician, thinks Obama is expressing what he in fact believes.

But this difference may be irrelevant. Paul Krugman has on several occasions criticized Obama for attacking the other candidates "from the right", especially on healthcare policy. Because, Krugman believes, that by doing so Obama would weaken his ability as President to implement progressive healthcare reform.

It's not unfair criticism, regardless of your view on whether it is helpful.

And I think Obama is creating the same problem for himself on Iraq. That should he become President, proponents of the Surge will be able to point to his arguments re. progress in Iraq to lobby against withdrawal.

Kondracke thinks Obama is trying to create his own window to "declare victory and get out". If Kondracke's correct, I reckon Obama's being too clever by half. Anything that might be described as "progress" (and God knows the government has an endless supply of gimmickry to show evidence of progress) and can be presented as a by-product of the Surge will result in a continuation of the Surge.

This is not to say Obama is being loose with the facts or disingenuous about his stance. It is just that the President that will end the Iraq fiasco will be someone with the conviction to call it just that. And it is not clear that, for all his other qualities, Obama is willing to do that.

I thought that Obama was actually doing his job as a senator. He was trying to get info -- any info, any actual position that wasn't some generality -- out of the two, and not grandstanding and giving a speech.