Nearly three weeks ago, Senator Barack Obama delivered the most covered, controversial and talked about foreign policy speech this year of any candidate for president – Republican or Democrat.

Obama’s theme, of a need to “turn the page”, is a direct criticism of not only the foreign policy direction of the Bush administration, but also a way of illustrating that even his Democratic colleagues and contenders for the party’s nomination are out of step with the American public.

Well, no less than senior statesman, historian and grey-haired guru of the Democratic Party -- Ted Sorenson -- authored an op-ed in the Des Moines Register where he argues that Obama is right…while Sorenson also talks smack about his fellow Dems who have called Obama “naïve” and “untested”.

As America's standing and credibility in the world - and thus the security of our citizens - continue to plunge with each passing month of the Bush administration, foreign-policy judgment increasingly becomes the overriding criterion for the selection of our next president.

Those Democratic contenders who, as U.S. senators, voted to authorize the most disastrous blunder in U.S. foreign-policy history - the mindless, needless invasion and endless occupation of Iraq - are trying now to regain ground not by stopping the continuing tragic loss of American blood, billions and moral authority in Iraq, but by questioning the foreign-policy credentials of the one serious candidate who opposed the war even before its launch - Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Later in his op-ed, Sorenson makes an important comparison– especially to the Democratic base – as he equates Obama with another youthful Senator who ran for president: John F. Kennedy.

 

Obama is not the first young senator running for president to discomfort the Washington foreign-policy establishment by speaking frankly on a subject displeasing to an American ally. Fifty years ago this summer, a 40-year-old first-term senator, John F. Kennedy, called on the Senate floor for the U.S. government to pressure its French ally into halting its war against Algerian independence.

The response from all quarters - both French and American, both Republican and Democratic - was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Kennedy's critics used words such as "juvenile" (former Truman Secretary of State Dean Acheson), "brashly political and damaging" (Vice President Richard Nixon), an "oversimplification" (President Dwight D. Eisenhower), and "immature" (a senior congressional ally of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson). A New York Times columnist called Kennedy a "well-intentioned but amateur statesman."

As my colleague Raj Purohit and I have written recently, the Obama speech of August 1, in Washington didn’t sit well with us. However, Sorenson’s op-ed is quite articulate and very convincing in a political fashion.  Especially in closing where here literally anoints Obama the next JFK:

That record - not the traditional nay-sayers in Washington who copy Bush's "politics of fear" - represents the proudest past of the Democratic Party. Obama - though he, too, is called amateur and naive - represents its future.

Howard Salter