>>An interesting take, although it occurs to me that the logic should
work both ways...if Clinton's substitution of the first person singular
for the first person plural is a valid move, then Obama is welcome to
retroactively parse his own comments along the same lines.
Make sense though in subsequent remarks Obama seems to have at least in two cases defined his comments to mean direct face to face negotiations which (whether you agree or not) Clinton said she would not embrace without preconditions. It's hair splitting when you get right down to it but on the question of whether Hillary had committed the groaner some claimed, I didn't see it.
Obama's view from two interviews:
“If I sit down with a leader of Iran I will send them a
strong message that Israel is our friend and that we will assist in their
security and that we don’t find nuclear weapons acceptable… that’s not going to
be a propaganda coup for Iran, but what it does do is allow us to send a
message to the rest of the world that we are willing to sit down and talk.
[What she said] during the debate and subsequently was that she would not meet
with various leaders unless certain preconditions were met. Now, if that’s not
what she means, she should say so. But that was the question that was posed at
the debate. You need to get clarification from her if they are walking back
from the position that we stated."
"The general principle that I was laying out is that we
should not be afraid as America to meet with anybody…Now, they may not like
what we want to hear -- so if I’m talking to the President of Iran, I’m going
to inform him that Israel is our stalwart ally, and we are going to do what's
necessary to protect them -- that we will not accept a nuclear bomb in Iran,
but that doesn’t mean we can’t say that face to face. And obviously, the
diplomatic spadework has to be done ahead of time. The notion that I was
somehow going to be inviting them over for tea next week without having initial
envoys meet is ridiculous.”
