Obama does it Truman style -- giving 'em hell over Iraq

He played off the enthusiasms of a fervent crowd of 2,000 in a downtown hotel ballroom to lambaste President Bush's policy in Iraq, noting the Democratic effort to use legislation to bring troops home in a phased withdrawal is meeting an impenetrable stone wall: the president's veto.

"I don't think we are going to change George Bush's mind," Obama said. "He doesn't seem to be someone who examines the facts."

Obama has been arguing all along that the solution to the war in Iraq is a political one and the lengthy presence of American troops will do nothing to solve the impasse among the various Iraqi ethnic groups. He asserts the solution is political, not military.

Several times in his half-hour talk, he invoked the name of former President John F. Kennedy who had called on his own generation to reach for seemingly impossible goals, such as landing a man on the moon.

Obama reiterated his own theme that Americans need to find a unity of mind amongst themselves and also to reach out to the rest of the world to resolve issues such as global warming, the debacle in Darfur and nuclear proliferation. We need to mend our relationships abroad, he explained.

"The day this president steps down, the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief," Obama said.

He also called for the closing of Guantanamo -- the American military base in Cuba where putative al-Qaida terrorists are imprisoned: "Why don't we say we don't do torture, we don't do rendition, that's not who we are as a people."

He concluded with another theme he regularly invokes: that America needs to be transformed into a country that expresses humanity and "core decency" so it can remain a "beacon of hope" to the rest of the world.