"Edwards says Obama using stolen ideas"

The Hill:

Former Sen. John Edwards’s (D-N.C.) campaign widened its sights Tuesday to include Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and his foreign policy speech commemorating the five-year anniversary of his first speech against the Iraq war.

Echoing criticisms lodged by surrogates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) earlier in the year, Edwards’s campaign charged that Obama was complicit in prolonging the war by voting in favor of several war funding bills since coming to the Senate.

“Sen. Obama likes to talk about his speech on Iraq years ago, but the truth is he did support past funding requests that only helped prolong this war,” an Edwards spokeswoman, Colleen Murray, said in an e-mail. “The time has come for Sen. Obama to lead and use every tool available to him as a senator and help ensure that this war is not funded again without a firm deadline. For John Edwards, the choice is very simple. It’s time for Congress to stand up to President Bush and make the message very clear — ‘No timeline, no funding. No excuses.’ ”

The criticisms represent an apparent change in strategy for the Edwards campaign. Thus far this year it has directed most of its fire at Clinton’s campaign.

Edwards’s campaign also blasted Obama for parroting the former senator in a foreign policy speech he gave Tuesday in which he said he wanted to work towards ending nuclear proliferation. They said the senator has followed Edwards on a number of issues this campaign year, including healthcare, poverty and now nuclear proliferation.

“If you need any more proof that John Edwards is shaping the race for the Democratic nomination, you don’t need to look any further than Senator Obama, who has followed Edwards’s lead on healthcare, poverty and, today, eliminating nuclear weapons,” Murray said in an e-mail to The Hill. “Next thing you know, he’ll be rooting for the Tar Heels.”

Edwards first addressed the issue of nuclear proliferation in speeches to the Council on Foreign Relations in May, then again during a speech on counterterrorism in September.

Obama noted Edwards’s dismay with the timing and language of the healthcare plans during last month’s Democratic debate in New Hampshire.

“I think John deserves credit for his proposal,” Obama said. “I know that he feels that he put out his plan first. You know, Harry Truman put something out 60 years ago for universal healthcare. I wrote about it in a book that I wrote last year, a plan very similar to John’s. The issue is not going to be who has these particular plans. It has to do with who can inspire and mobilize the American people to get it done and open up the process.”

In his speech Tuesday, Obama’s primary target likely was Clinton, but Edwards also voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution, a vote for which he has since apologized.

“Some seek to rewrite history,” Obama said Tuesday, according to a transcript provided by the campaign. “They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy.

“But the Congress, the administration, the media and the American people all understood what we were debating in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: How can you give the president a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?”

The Obama campaign took issue with both criticisms Edwards’s campaign lobbed Tuesday.

“Edwards joined many, including Ronald Reagan, who have said that we should seek a world with no nuclear weapons, but he did not lay out any policy for how he would get there,” Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in an e-mail. “Obama has specific policies to move in the direction of the goal. That includes securing all loose nuclear materials around the world in his first term in office, seeking dramatic reductions in U.S.-Russian stockpiles, the goal of a global ban on fissile-material protection, and the goal of a global ban on intermediate range missiles.”

And Psaki was equally adamant in recalling the distinction between the two candidates’ positions on the war when the votes were being cast.

“While it may be politically expedient for some candidates to attempt to blur the lines, the American people should ask themselves — who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right and who got it wrong,” Psaki said. “If others want to defend their choice in 2002, they should do so. Sen. Obama opposed this war in Iraq when Washington’s conventional thinking supported it, and he is the only candidate with the right judgment and experience to lead this country.”