A friend of mine sent me this in an email:
On the topic of Obama, when it comes to his record on voting while a senator why is it that a majority of the time he never really votes? It's like he is sitting on the fence watching everything but he doesn't want to jump in and make a decision.
I composed this rather longish reply to that and I wanted to share it here:
To quote the New York Times:
"Mr. Obama cast 4,000 votes in the Illinois Senate and used the present vote to protest bills that he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy."Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general who was in the Illinois Senate with Mr. Obama from 1998 through 2002, said she and Mr. Obama voted present on the anti-abortion bills.
"It's just plain wrong to imply that voting present reflected a lack of leadership," Ms. Madigan said. "In fact, it was the exact opposite."
He voted present 130 times out of 4000. It's hardly "the majority of the time".
If you want a good article on Obama's and Clinton's legislative records, you should read this diary entry on Daily Kos. Someone actually went and looked at the library of congress record of the two candidate's records in the US Senate. It's a very informative article.
I'm sure eventually someone will compare Obama and McCain, but really, McCain has been in the Senate for 35 years. He was a member of the Keating 5. He preaches against lobbyists, but then he has 59 of them working in senior positions on his campaign. In December he said that the Army Field Manual contained all the interrogation techniques the CIA needed and then last week he voted against a bill that would have made that mandatory. McCain has actually been absent many times from the Senate when his one vote would have made the difference in a bill passing. This has happened several times on bills where he claims that he cares about the issue at hand. I can't find the article on this, but if you want it, I can find it.
The truth is that the Democrats get to choose between two great candidates (and earlier 6 - Biden, Richardson, Dodd and Edwards were all great candidates). The Republicans basically didn't have a single candidate that had really demonstrated leadership during his career. McCain was the most electable from a list of pretty pathetic candidates.
There's more to say, but this email is getting long already. All I can say is, I've looked at Obama's record and I believe that he is a strong candidate who has a demonstrated track record of getting things done. Anyone who tells you differently is distorting the truth.
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