Obama lashes out at Bush, McCain over appeasement comments
'They're trying to scare you,' he says of the two Republicans at a South Dakota forum. Obama also picks up another superdelegate, and John Edwards says he won't be a vice presidential candidate again.
WATERTOWN, S.D. — Sen. Barack Obama today slammed President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain for suggesting that Democrats were willing to negotiate with terrorists.
Speaking before a forum on agricultural issues, Obama strongly responded to what he described as an unprecedented attack from President Bush during an address to the Knesset on Thursday and McCain's comments later in the day.
"They're trying to scare you and trying to keep you from seeing the truth," Obama told a cheering crowd, "and the reason is they can't win a foreign policy argument on the merits."
Obama today continued to link McCain to the Bush administration, a key theme the Democrats have loudly sounded as the political battles have focused more on the general elections in November. Both men "have a lot to answer for" in foreign policy, Obama said.
"Our Iran policy is a complete failure right now. I'm running for president to change course, not to continue George Bush's," he said.
Saying that what's needed in U.S. policy toward Iran is "tough principled diplomacy," Obama said that is what was advocated by former presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and Bush's own defense secretary, Robert Gates.
In a speech to the Israeli Knesset on Thursday marking the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding, Bush attacked those who wanted to negotiate, though he never named anyone.
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. . . . We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," the president said.
At a televised news conference, Obama said he was offended by Bush's comments and noted that past presidents, including Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Reagan, had talked directly to dictators.
"There is a strong, bipartisan tradition of engaging in that kind of diplomacy," Obama told reporters.
The White House today continued to deny that Bush meant to single out Obama, arguing that aides wondered if some might take the remark as a slap at former President Jimmy Carter, who raised eyebrows last month when he met with the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
