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Obama's veteran appeal

James Forsyth

Monday, 3rd March 2008

In an attempt to answer the Clinton charge that he is, as they say in this part of the world, all sizzle and no steak, Barack Obama has added a bunch of small, issue-specific town halls to his schedule. Earlier today, I was at one I am at he did at a veterans’ home in San Antonio, Texas.

This was the first time I had seen Obama take questions from voters and it is clear that the town hall is not Obama’s best environment. He is nowhere near as fluent when talking about policy as Hillary Clinton, nor does he have the easy rapport with questioners that John McCain does. Even before an invited audience of 80 or so, Obama seemed mildly uncomfortable and took relatively few questions.

Obama’s pitch to veterans uses his family ties, his grandfather served in World War Two, his commitment to keeping the sacred trust of the government to its veterans and opposition to the Iraq war. Indeed, in the last line of his final answer he pivoted back to how he would decided whether or not to go to war and took a shot at Hillary Clinton by stressing that he would rely on the “best of the intelligence available,” a sly reference to Hillary’s failure to read the full National Intelligence Estimate before voting to authorize the president to use force against Iraq. In a general election, you would expect McCain to win the lion’s share of the veteran’s vote. One senses that Obama’s appeal to Vets will be another way to emphasize his opposition to the Iraq war as much as anything else.