Clinton thread
Out of context: Reply #86
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But there's one more crucial way in which Barack Obama can inspire, distinct from how Hillary Clinton could ever hope to inspire, and that's the inspiration he would offer towards peace. We in this country need to acknowledge to the world a certain mistake that most of us understand we made. At the height of insanity, after this extraordinary and horrible bombing, of our own citizens on our own territory, we were led into war by a president who didn't care to pay attention to the facts.
This was the biggest political blunder, perhaps ever, that an American president engaged. It was extraordinarily destructive — destructive to us and to them. If we're going to find peace here, then that peace will only come if we can signal our own change. A change that they understand is a change in who we are, a change that they can see.
So I want you to shut your eyes and imagine what it will seem like to a young man in Iraq or in Iran, who wakes up on January 21st, 2009, and sees the picture of this man as the president of the United States. A man who opposed the war at the beginning, a man who worked his way up from almost nothing, a man who came from a mother and a father of mixed cultures and mixed societies, who came from a broken home to overcome all of that to become the leader in his class, at the Harvard Law Review, and an extraordinary success as a politician. How can they see us when they see us as having chosen this man as our president?
There can be no clearer way that we could say, that we could say that the United States could say, that we have changed, than by electing this man. There is no way we could more clearly move on toward peace than this. He represents the very best of who we are, the best of character, of integrity and ideals. And someone who opposed the war from the start.