Its no secret that I am an Obama man.



Many people take that to mean that I care more about style than
substance. Though that is often the case with me, (I play drinking music on
the violin; if I worried about substance I'd be too scared to even
look at the thing) in this instance I like to assure myself otherwise.



This assurance has occasionally proven difficult to defend, however,
because the "substance" I find exciting in Obama often takes an
abstract form, and I end up using terms like "worldview" and
"overriding philosophical approach" and "Tao".



Words which seem rather, well, unsubstantial. And style-ey. I mean stylish. Whatever.



Thankfully, Talking Points Memo alumnus Spencer Ackerman seems to be better with words.

When considering any presidential hopeful's foreign-policy promises,
it's important to remember that what candidates say is, at best, an
imperfect guide to their actions in office. What proves to be a more
reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of
advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would
have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and
realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.)



(snip)



"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like
Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that
that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's
closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't
care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the
leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us
anywhere.'"



(snip)



The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a
phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long
time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national
security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from
the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled
weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as
the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and
innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for
fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that
very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope
John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.

Every single paragraph in the article reminds me of why I believe Obama
is THE MOST SUBSTANTIAL candidate I'm ever likely to see. He and his
team CAN'T WAIT to wrap this election around foreign policy, and
neither can I. To me, their mindset represents the exact antidote to
the regressive and absurd logic that got us into Iraq (as well as the
myriad realpolitik atrocities that led up to it) in the first place.



It's time to kick some ass!



Whoops. Sorry, got a little crazy there.



Cross posted at livejournal.com.