Obama tears into Bush, McCain

WATERTOWN, S.D. — Sen. Barack Obama pushed back Friday against President Bush's implicit criticism of his approach to foreign policy, condemning his administration for not capturing Osama bin Laden and blaming its Iraq war policy for strengthening Iran.

Obama, cheered on by a crowd at a livestock arena, said he would be delighted if the presidential race turned into a conversation about which party is better suited to guide the nation's foreign policy.

"If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have anytime, anyplace, and that is a debate I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for," the Democratic front-runner said.

The speech triggered a daylong foreign-policy exchange between him and McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama's challenger for the Democratic nomination, was left largely on the sidelines.

Obama used a speech that was otherwise focused on rural issues to respond to Bush's comments to the Israeli Knesset on Thursday. The president said that "some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals," and went on to compare a willingness to meet with "terrorists and radicals" to the pre-World War II "appeasement" of Nazi Germany.

Presidential counselor Ed Gillespie said Friday that the remarks were not a reference to Obama.

Gillespie said White House aides expected some might interpret the remarks as "a rebuke" of former President Carter, who recently met with leaders of Hamas, but Gillespie said the comments were not meant to single out Carter, either.

Later Friday, Obama called it "disingenuous" to say he was not the target of the president's comments.

Obama then used the exchange to link Bush's foreign-policy record to McCain's stance toward the Middle East, and to outline the ways his approach to the world's most vexing problems would differ from those of the current administration.

He launched into a critique of Bush's foreign-policy record. His list of grievances included a war fought on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that were never found, the failure to capture bin Laden, and turning Iran into the "greatest beneficiary" of the Iraq war.

Obama said McCain will "need to answer" for a strengthened al-Qaida leadership, Hamas' control of Gaza, and Iran's ability to fund Hezbollah and pose "the greatest threat to America and Israel and the Middle East in a generation."

"That's the Bush-McCain record on protecting this country," Obama said. "Those are the failed policies that John McCain wants to double down on."

In a later appearance, Obama added that he is "puzzled" that the concept of meeting with controversial foreign leaders is a point of debate "when this has been the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently."

He pointed to President Kennedy's meetings with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when the United States and Russia were on the brink of nuclear war, and to President Nixon's meeting with China's Mao Zedong, "with the knowledge that Mao had exterminated millions of people."

In a speech in Louisville, Ky., at the National Rifle Association's annual meeting, McCain questioned why Obama would consider meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"I have some news for Senator Obama: Talking, not even with soaring rhetoric, in unconditional meetings with the man who calls Israel a 'stinking corpse' and arms terrorists who kill Americans will not convince Iran to give up its nuclear program," McCain said.

"It would be a wonderful thing if we lived in a world where we don't have enemies. But that is not the world we live in," he added.

Clinton campaigned Friday in Oregon ahead of primaries there and in Kentucky on Tuesday, and her team put out a new ad in the state that takes on one of her favorite punching bags: Washington pundits. While footage that includes pictures of Tim Russert, George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews rolls by, a narrator declares: "In Washington, they talk about who's up and who's down. In Oregon, we care about what's right and what's wrong."

Election panel

nominee pulls out

WASHINGTON — Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer who became a lightning rod for partisan wrangling over an alleged Bush administration voter-suppression campaign, pulled his name from consideration for a seat on the Federal Election Commission on Friday.

His nomination had been stalled for months amid allegations that he interpreted laws in ways that would inhibit voting by poor, elderly and minority voters, who tend to back Democrats.

His withdrawal could break an impasse that has all but disabled the FEC from functioning in a year of record presidential-campaign fundraising. The commission has operated for months two votes short of a quorum needed to take enforcement action.

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