Whatever speech Obama made while serving in the Illinois state Senate, the fact remains that his U.S. Senate Iraq voting record is identical to Clintons.

Voters know this.

I will give the guy credit where credit is due.  He gives great speeches.  If all a President had to do was give speeches I would vote for him over Clinton and Edwards.

Because Clinton is no Lieberman.

In fact, Lieberman was wise too to erase the distinction from Lamont by producing Dishonest Ads that he wants to bring troops home.

I dont think the problem is Obama--It is just the Clinton name and she really is very intelligent and has charisma and  Bill Clinton's wife.

That is what Obama is running against.

This is actually pretty odd. I mean, to ask his followers to celebrate the five-year anniversary of a speech he gave five years ago. This sounds too much like the behavior of dictators. I mean, come on, this is really odd.

This WaPo article shows the pitfalls that come with Obama's new play.  It is called an actual record and speeches Obama made that are contradictory to his stand of today.  Everybody is entitled to changing their minds, but a great agent of change he is certainly not:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con tent/article/2007/10/02/AR2007100200190. html

But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator's claim that he was a "courageous leader" who opposed the war at great political risk.

The truth is that while Obama showed foreign policy savvy and an ability to keenly analyze both sides of an issue in his October 2002 warnings on Iraq, the political upside of his position rivaled any risk.

And, once elected to the U.S. Senate two years later, Obama waited months to show national leadership on Iraq.

Even now, as he hopes to ride his anti-war credentials to the White House, Obama's views on how to end the conflict differ little from those of Democratic rivals who voted in the fall of 2002 to give President Bush authority to wage war.

Courageous or calculating? These are the facts:

In 2004, while getting ready for his star-making address to the Democratic National Convention, Obama gave presidential nominee John Kerry and other leading Democrats a pass for backing Bush on Iraq.

Noting he was not privy to intelligence reports shown to Kerry and others, Obama told The New York Times, "What would I have done? I don't know."

Once elected, Obama didn't force the issue in the Senate. His first floor speech encouraged Democrats to drop challenges to the 2004 presidential election "at a time when we try to make certain we encourage democracy in Iraq."

His first major address on Iraq came in November 2005, when he said U.S. forces remained "part of a solution."

Seven months later, he was voting in step with Clinton for a middle-of-the-road approach. On June 22, 2006, they both backed a nonbinding resolution to pull troops out of Iraq.

More meaningfully, they also rejected a bill _ backed by the force of law _ that would have required the troops to come home by a date certain.

Nothing wrong with minimizing risk and exposure as a Senator.  But it is then hard to cast yourself as the agent of change if you do so, indeed have forceful speeches on the Senate floor criticizing those who sought to bring troops out of Iraq before this year.

This has been a contradiction for Obama since the beginning, and it lends itself to an incoherent message.

I just don't get it- he looks like he has nothing else to say.  You can't pound a square block into a round hole.  Does he not realize he has been saying this over and over since the beginning with virtually no effect?  Does he think people will react to it only after they have heard it 200 times?  He just seems "lost" to me- not ever knowing what to do next so he does nothing next.  Granted, I would not know what to tell him to do to flip the page, but this same old rhetoric isn't the answer to his problems.  But it's his campaign and he can do what he wants.

B-Rock keeps saying that he was a candidate for the US Senate when he gave his anti-war speech. That is not true. In October 2002, he was running for re-election to his part-time seat in the Illinois State Senate.

He did not run for the US Senate until the Novemer 2004 election, more than two years after his anti-war speech.

Why does he keep lying about what office he was running for in October 2002?

MR. RUSSERT: Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?

SENATOR OBAMA: I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible. We don't know what contingency will be out there. What I can promise is that if there are still troops in Iraq when I take office, which it appears there may be unless we can get some of our Republican colleagues to change their mind and cut off funding without a timetable, if there's no timetable, then I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities there. I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out.