photo credit: thenss

Senator Barack Obama is stepping up his rhetoric against Senator Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks. This weekend Senator Clinton challenge Obama’s experience by saying his credentials for foreign policy is based on “one speech” and revealing an ad saying she was the candidate best prepared to be in the White House at “3 A.M.” in the event of a crisis.

Remarks for Senator Barack Obama
Town Hall Meeting
Westerville, Ohio

Sunday, March 2, 2008
As Prepared for Delivery

You know, in the last few days, Senator Clinton’s been running around telling people that our entire campaign is only based on the fact that I opposed this war in Iraq from the start. She, on other hand, supposedly has all this foreign policy experience.

But when it came time to make the most important foreign policy decision of our generation – the decision to invade Iraq – Senator Clinton got it wrong. She didn’t read the National Intelligence Estimate. She didn’t first give diplomacy a chance. And to do this day, she won’t even admit that her vote was a mistake or even that it was a vote for war. And so besides that decision to invade Iraq, we’re still waiting to hear Senator Clinton tell us what foreign policy experience she actually has.

I know what our campaign is based on. Yes, it is based on the fact that we should never have authorized a war that’s cost us thousands of lives and billions of dollars. But it’s also based on a lot more.

Our campaign is based on the idea that we need to turn the page on the Bush-Cheney era of diplomacy by not just talking to our friends, but our enemies. Because as John F. Kennedy said, “You should never negotiate out of fear, but you should never fear to negotiate.”

Our campaign is based on the fact that I’m the only candidate who hasn’t taken a dime of money from Washington lobbyists, and the only one who’s actually taken away the power of lobbyists by passing a law to do it.

Our campaign is based on the fact that I’m the only candidate who didn’t vote for a bankruptcy bill that made it harder for working families to climb out of debt. I want to reform our bankruptcy laws to give families a second chance, and to make sure CEOs can never again dump your pension with one hand and collect their bonus with another.

Our campaign is based on my twenty years of actually bringing about change that made a difference in people’s lives – on the fact that I expanded health care for 150,000 children and parents, provided tax relief to the working poor, passed racial profiling legislation to protect equal rights, stopped wrongful executions in Illinois, and worked with Republicans in Washington to secure loose nuclear weapons from falling into terrorist hands. Our campaign is based on that.

Our campaign is based on the idea that we can put the people’s interests before the special interests; that we can stop telling the American people what they want to hear and start telling them what they need to hear; that we can have a politics in America where we stop tearing each other down and start lifting this country up. That’s what our campaign is based on, and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States.