Video: Obama on terror-attack priorities

posted at 11:10 am on June 18, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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The RNC has become nimble at quick reaction, and the video of this Barack Obama quote shows it. Earlier today, Rudy Giuliani mentioned Obama’s response during a debate to a question on the first actions necessary from the President if two American cities had been hit by an attack, and within a few minutes, this YouTube has hit the e-mail circuit. The question comes from the South Carolina debate in April 2007, and Brian Williams specifically framed in terms of military posture. Obama postures in a completely different sense instead:

I’ll include the entire answer from the debate:

Q: Senator Obama, if, God forbid a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that it had been the work of al-Qaeda, how would you change the US military stance overseas as a result?

A: Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans. And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.

The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and b., to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network. But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.

Because as already been stated, we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We’ve got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they’ve got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.

Apparently, the first action Obama would take would be to posture on his anti-Bush credentials.  However poor the Katrina response was, that failure started at the state and local level, before and after the hurricane struck.  The FEMA response to 9/11 was actually quite good, mainly because Rudy Giuliani wasn’t Ray Nagin and the other attack occurred in DC, where the federal agencies had primary sovereignty anyway.

Besides that, though, Obama didn’t understand the question, and even his longer answer shows that.  Williams asked him what he would do if we had incontrovertible evidence that AQ had conducted the attack.  Obama avoided that by saying we’d have to do an investigation to be really, really, super-sure that AQ was responsible, and only then “take potentially some action” to dismantle the network.  Otherwise, he’d mostly just talk — to the American people, to our allies, and anyone else who might feel alienated by any action we took to defend ourselves from further attack.

The RNC really should have clipped the entire answer.  Never once in this answer does Obama pledge to take action against terrorists who would have killed thousands of Americans once again in terrorist attacks.  It’s far more important for Obama to talk than take action.

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