Obama and Clinton: Similarities at Three in the Morning

It was a catchy commercial for Hillary Clinton during the pre-election battle that was the Democratic presidential primaries in the United States: the 3 AM call. A president must answer, even when the surprise call comes at three in the morning, and be able to react to a historically global crisis, or so it goes. Barack Obama was nevertheless an outsider – and so inexperienced in security policy, even naïve, that one cannot trust him to lead the county, which the former first lady argued. The nation could not afford a one month-long learning curve in the Oval Office for the 47-year-old junior senator from Illinois.

Obama countered Hillary Clinton’s attack stating that the first lady didn’t exactly have much foreign policy experience, either. On trips beside her husband Bill, the 42nd president, Hillary Clinton “did little more than drink tea with foreign political figures.” Besides, judgment does not arise from a short term in the Senate – that worked against both New York Senator Clinton as well as against Joe Biden, the senator from Delaware who was at that time also Obama’s competition and who has since then been named his vice president. Ultimately, both Clinton and Biden voted for the Senate resolution in October 2002 which authorized President George W. Bush to march into Iraq.

Where is the Promised Change?

In contrast, Obama, who was not in the Senate at that time, admittedly did not say he was fundamentally against every military engagement, but rather that he was against a “stupid war” like the one in Iraq. With that, Obama made the right decision, while the two senators, despite all their experience, marched in the wrong direction with the Republican president.

This was an incredibly important argument for Obama in the primaries, because early opposition against the Iraq war mobilized the left wing of the party through grassroots activism that sincerely sought out Obama’s promised “Change.” That this proposed “Change” was not possible with Washington insiders like Hillary Clinton and Joseph Biden but rather only with Obama was something the majority of voters in the Democratic primaries ultimately believed.

Meanwhile, on the left-wing blogs, there is some chatter in light of Obama’s foreign and security policy personnel decisions: Where is the promised “Change” – with Biden as vice president, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of State and especially in keeping Robert Gates, President Bush’s secretary of Defense?

A “Team of Rivals”?

The ideological differences between the candidates on foreign and security policies that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stressed so much due to pre-primary tactics were actually, upon closer examination, anything but dramatic. From a “Team of Rivals” as it is occasionally called, the discourse can only be seen to the extent that both once wanted the same job, not because they advocated different positions.

Since Obama moved into the Senate in January 2005, his voting behavior on general foreign policy questions corresponded with Hillary Clinton’s: both voted for the supplementary budget to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although Mrs. Clinton has become the winner of the war in Mesopotamia; although an immediate or speedy withdrawal of the troops in Iraq is something neither wants to force with the instrument of the budget. Clinton, like Obama, was against the troop surge enforced by President Bush in February 2007 in Iraq – and both were mistaken in the prediction that more American troops would mean more chaos instead of more security.

Almost Identical Positions

Obama, like Hillary Clinton, is asking for an increase in the standing troop strength that has become a haggard army from two long wars and also in the marine infantry. They are for the expansion of American military strength to be “the strongest on our planet,” (Obama) as well as for the stabilization of global influence over all of America’s potential rivals. They are, as Obama expressed in the press conference Monday with Clinton and the other members of his national security team, both nevertheless supporting the continued development of hard strength along with soft strength, namely that “the wisdom and the strength of our diplomacy will be connected.”

That the United States after the global conflict over the Iraq War can move forward with “the strength of a moral example” in order to use their global influence is the same credo of the chosen president and his future secretary of State. Even on the concrete facts, like the quick withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq, Obama and Clinton advocate nearly identical positions.

Obama indeed is formally upholding his election claims that all troops must be withdrawn within 16 months after he takes office in January. But he assures that with this decision he will follow the advice of commanders in the field and will take the security interests of the American troops as well as the Iraqis into consideration. Hillary Clinton could frame it the same way.