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• Sunday, January 6, 2008 07:37 AM

  Obama - too nice?

  I don't get this meme that Barack Obama is "too nice." Where is it coming from?

  One of the first times that Obama made me sit up and take notice is when John Howard, then-prime minister of Australia said "If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats."

  To which Obama responded that if John Howard really wanted to do something to win the War on Terror, he might consider sending more than 1,000 Australian troops to Iraq.

  It was the perfect answer and it shut Howard up. All too often, Democrats seem incapable of offering clear, common-sense rebuttals to their critics. There's always some obvious rejoinder that you wish they'd make, but somehow they always manage to be too muddleheaded and/or cowardly to make it.

  But Obama seems to have a talent for cutting through the bullshit and saying what needs to said. Maybe if Edwards had taken a page from the Obama book, he might have beaten Dick Cheney in the 2004 vice presidential debate (how does a former trial attorney manage to lose a debate to one of the least popular figures in American politics?)

  —Anonymous
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