What Obama can be called on here is, well, audacity: Preaching a new style of politics while engaging in ducking and weaseling on an issue and then criticizing his opponent who took a stand. There’s nothing new about that. It’s standard Washington politics, the way I see it. (But then, so is running against “Washington politics.” Bush II in 2000, Bill Clinton in 1992, Reagan in 1980 and Carter in 1976 did it with great success. None of them were actually in office in Washington when they ran against Washington, however.)

Still, Obama wins on tactics. This amendment was a sham, and he deftly avoided allowing it to become the subject of a 527 ad against him.

I remember thinking at the time that Obama had ducked it. It was this incident that led me to look into his voting record, which is when I discovered that he voted “present” dozens of times in the Illinois Senate and a few times in the U.S. Senate before he started campaigning.

The vote was discussed in the debate that night, including this from Mike Gravel: “There was a vote in the Senate today — Joe Lieberman, who authored the Iraq resolution, has offered another resolution, and it [is] essentially a fig leaf to let George Bush go to war with Iran. And I want to congratulate Biden for voting against it, Dodd for voting against, and I’m ashamed of you, Hillary, for voting for it. You’re not going to get another shot at this, because what’s happened if this war ensues — we invade and they’re looking for an excuse to do it. And Obama was not even there to vote.”

A few days later, Obama criticized Clinton’s vote in an interview with the AP:

“There’s nothing wrong with identifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, but it is a problem when you start using Iran as a justification for troop structures in Iraq and providing language that could potentially lead to military action in Iran,” Obama told The Associated Press on Monday following a campaign event in Nashua. Obama missed the vote on the resolution because he was campaigning in New Hampshire.

“Sen. Clinton and others should have learned from 2002 that if you give President George Bush a blank check that he’ll cash it. You’ve got to be very cautious and very sober regarding any kind of language or rationale that leads him to make more disastrous foreign policy decisions,” Obama said.

I didn’t agree with Clinton’s vote. As Sharkey said, she was pandering to the middle in the general election. But she went on the record, right or wrong. Obama’s priority was to leave Washington that morning to attend a fundraiser, which either demonstrates his real thoughts about how unimportant this nonbinding “sense of the Senate” vote was — or he ducked it in order not go on the record with a “no” vote which, though it would have pleased his supporters in the primaries, would have been ammunition against him in the general.

All that being said, on tactics, he did the right thing by defusing this issue in the general. There won’t be 527 ads saying, “Obama voted against declaring Iran a terror state.”

This statement was released by his office for the record on the day of the vote: “Senator Obama clearly recognizes the serious threat posed by Iran. However, he does not agree with the president that the best way to counter that threat is to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq, and he does not think that now is the time for saber-rattling towards Iran. In fact, he thinks that our large troop presence in Iraq has served to strengthen Iran – not weaken it. He believes that diplomacy and economic pressure, such as the divestment bill that he has proposed, is the right way to pressure the Iranian regime. Accordingly, he would have opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment had he been able to vote today.”

You didn’t say he was ducking the vote or avoiding going on record but if that’s what you’re thinking, this statement would contradict it.