Opinion: In Iowa, Obama brings up foreign affairs again

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Neither one uttered the name ‘Hillary,’’ but when both Barack and Michelle Obama spoke to a crowd of supporters at a junior high school in Council Bluffs, Iowa yesterday afternoon, there was no doubt who they had in mind.

Introducing her husband to supporters gathered in the school gym, with The Times’ Peter Nicholas on hand, Michelle Obama described her frustration over a style of politics that she says makes people afraid, that uses fear to motivate them.

Decisions are getting made in Washington ‘because people told us we had to fear something,’’ she said. How long has that been happening? she wondered out loud. Then, she answered herself: For the last 10 years, she said.

Let’s see now. If we’re not terribly mistaken, that decade time span happens to coincide with the presidencies of both George W. Bush and William J. Clinton, husband to Obama’s primary opponent, Hillary.

In his own speech, Obama mentioned a running argument he’s had with the New York senator over the wisdom of sitting down and negotiating with leaders of rogue nations. Obama was asked at a ...

recent debate if he would meet with these dictators in the first year of his presidency without preconditions. He said yes. Clinton pounced, trying to show her experience by saying she wouldn’t allow the presidency to be used for such propaganda purposes.

In a later speech, in an effort to polish his limited foreign policy credentials, Obama talked tough about unilaterally bombing Al Qaeda in Pakistan if necessary, which Clinton ridiculed as naive. She and some other Democrats also criticized Obama when he ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in such assaults.

It’s a delicate political position for Obama, who would rather talk about his main campaign message of turning over a fresh page in leadership than about his lack of foreign policy experience. But in Iowa this week he’s faced it head-on and sought to turn his opponents’ foreign affairs experience against them. Obama told supporters at the junior high: ‘I am not afraid of losing a propaganda battle to a bunch of dictators.’’

In a later news conference, he sought to clarify matters further. Meeting a foreign leader without pre-conditions doesn’t mean he wouldn’t fully prepare for the meeting, Obama said.

‘There’s no instance in which a president of the United States would meet with another head of state without preparation and having done the diplomatic legwork,’’ Obama added.

He also used the news conference to mount a more direct critique of the Democratic front-runner. He cited Clinton’s Senate vote for the Iraq war as evidence that her own foreign policy skills might need some remedial work.

‘There is,’ Obama said, ‘not just with Sen. Clinton but with a lot of my opponents a premium on reciting the conventional wisdom in Washington. And that’s what passes for experience -- how well you do that. And my argument in this race is it’s that kind of rote approach to foreign policy that led a lot of people who should have known better to get into Iraq.’’

This fight is clearly not over.

--Andrew Malcolm