Obama would have voted for the war?

Also yesterday, my slightly less crazy right wing uncle advanced the notion that had Barack Obama been in the Senate at the time of the war vote, he would have voted for it. This, despite his speech of the same time:

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

That is, to say the least, not giving the President the benefit of the doubt. But Obama's critique goes beyond the notion of Iraq being stupid — by calling out the neoconservative cabal behind the pre-war propaganda effort, Obama's critique of the rush to war is actually to the left of Paul Wellstone. Obama's opposition to the war was derided by Clinton during the primary as "just a speech", but it was a hell of an insightful speech, and about the best he could do given where he was at the time. He also ran on opposition to the war in the 2004 Senate race, and has generally voted with the half of the Democratic caucus that opposed the war in 2002. So by any honest measure, it's insane to suppose that Obama would have voted for the war if he'd been in the Senate at the time.

My father, during the primaries, was able to come up with one similarity Obama has with war-supporting Senators. Since the 2002 vote, every Senator that has run for President voted for the war. Therefore, the logic goes, if Obama had been in the Senate, he would have voted for the war. Blarg!

The actual arrow of causation points in the other direction. Every overly ambitious asshole who wanted to be President voted for the war, some from actual love of war (Clinton, Lieberman), some from misguided belief that it was politically necessary (Kerry, Edwards). Only fringe characters voted against the war, which is why the Democratic party has elevated a backbencher to the nomination this year. The Democratic Party is anti-war, and wanted to nominate an anti-war candidate, so aside from crazies like Kucinich, we had to pick someone inexperienced on the national level. Every asshole that just wanted to be President voted for the war. But Obama was opposed to the war, which marks him as a non-asshole, which is why he gets to be President.

In addition, I think the willful blindness to plain truth represents a deeper psychological urge. Both my father and my uncle were supporters of the war in the beginning, and now regret that support. I put to you three different beliefs about the war:

1. Every right-thinking person supported the war.
2. I supported the war.
3. Barack Obama opposed the war.

If all three of these are true, then a crazy person is about to become President. I didn't support the war, of course, so I don't agree with the first two. But since Barack Obama is obviously not a crazy person, these three beliefs create problems for people who share 1 & 2. I suspect that most Americans who don't follow politics closely, will simply cease to believe 2 — while majorities of Americans said they favored the war, that support was always soft and has evaporated rather quickly over the past few years. People are surprisingly revisionist in recollecting their own mental histories. Honest people can cease to believe 1, and just admit they were wrong, and the anti-war side was right. This, too, will be relatively easy for most people.

But for people who consider themselves to be smart and well-informed, 1 and 2 are incredibly difficult to give up. So in order to make sense of the current situation, it is necessary to disbelieve 3.

Having the next President of the United States on the right side of the Iraq issue is a terrible psychological blow for formerly pro-war people who think they generally have good opinions, as it highlights just how wrong they were. It's much easier to have been on the wrong side of Iraq if we were all fooled. Barack Obama's public awareness of America's folly calls into question the entire elite consensus. So it must not be true. Otherwise, they might have to listen to the dirty fucking hippies in the future.