Obama said 'no' to Iraq money in theory, 'yes' in reality

PAHRUMP, Nev. -- When Barack Obama was running for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois in 2004, he filled out a questionnaire for the Chicago Sun-Times answering "no" to this question: Would you have voted for the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq and Afghanistan?

Once elected to the Senate, Obama voted for a series of war funding measures, as did chief rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

For months, the Clinton campaign has been trying to get people to pay attention to this point, as Obama's White House drive features his initial opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 when he was an Illinois state senator.

Clinton wants the focus to be on what Obama did regarding war funding once he got in the Senate. Obama wants to emphasize he was against war authorization and Clinton voted for it. She wants to talk about funding and plant seeds about whether Obama's anti-war talk in his presidential campaign matches his actions while a senator.

Both are worthy conversations.

Clinton and former President Bill Clinton are now pushing the Obama Iraq funding votes, because, I surmise, they think it will hurt Obama if more people were aware of his voting record.

The former president got in trouble when he said there was "no difference" between Obama's and Hillary Clinton's voting records on Iraq. "Give me a break," he said. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Clinton defended her husband for his "fairy tale" remark.

"Let me address the point that Bill was making because, again, I think it's been unfairly and inaccurately characterized. What he was talking about was very directly about the story of Senator Obama's campaign being premised on a speech he gave in 2002. And that was to his credit. He gave a speech opposing the war in Iraq. He gave a very impassioned speech against it and consistently said that he was against the war, he would vote against the funding for the war."

The Clinton team must see this as a potent matter, because on Sunday morning, after Clinton was on "Meet the Press," her campaign hurriedly organized a conference call with, among others, Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton State Department spokesman. He said when it comes to funding votes, Obama's and Clinton's Senate records are "virtually identical."

Said Rubin, "There is nothing unique about his Iraq war position except a speech he made that he never followed through on."

Later, Obama was asked why he cast those war funding votes.

"Once we had our troops two years into a war, it was important that we try to do the best possible job on it," Obama said.

As Rubin was winding down, another rushed conference call, this one organized by the Obama campaign, was under way, featuring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Durbin's role here was to underscore that Obama has always been against the Iraq war. "His position on the war in Iraq has never changed," Durbin said.

To be continued, I'm sure.