A Dig?

Insofar as Hillary Clinton intends to listen to Gene Sperling on economics and Barack Obama intends to listen to Austan Goolsbee, it doesn't seem that they're going to have a great deal to disagree about. Thus, after Sperling spoke at the panel on the economy I'm sitting in, Goolsbee didn't exactly lay into his analysis. He did, however, rather pointedly include the cost of the Iraq War on his list of "things that have changed" about the economy since the beginning of the Clinton administration, noting that with the $1 trillion+ that were spent on Iraq, one could easily have paid for all the various safety-net enhancements that Sperling had been saying we should adopt.

Comments

Why would Goolsbee "lay into" Sperling regarding the Iraq War costs considering the fact that Obama's Senate voting record with regards to Iraq is identical to Clinton's?

Posted by JoeCHI | August 3, 2007 3:05 PM

Maybe it was a dig at Matthew Yglesias? Obama seems to laying everything on the "I told you so" line, which is going to be a mistake, especially since as JoeCHI say his voting record is the same as Clinton's once he got to the Senate, and he also appears to support residual forces in Iraq.

A vote for Obama doesn't reset the clock to 2002, he needs to focus on the future.

Posted by AJ | August 3, 2007 3:36 PM

Obama seems to laying everything on the "I told you so" line, which is going to be a mistake

I'm not much of an Obama fan, but this strikes me as completely wrong. The obvious utility of the "I told you so" line is to poke a giant hole in Clinton's "experience" line of attack: how valuable is whatever experience Clinton is supposed to have if, at the end of the day, she still gets the big questions wrong?

Posted by Christmas | August 3, 2007 4:02 PM