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Traveling in Iowa today U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., conducted a phone interview with Douglas Burns of Iowa Independent and the Carroll Daily Times Herald. Here is the exchange with the Democratic presidential candidate:
Iowa Independent: You’ve never travelled to continental Europe as far as I can tell. And if elected …
Obama: “No. No. No. That’s not accurate to say. What you’re saying is I haven’t taken a congressional delegation. I have not made an official trip. I’ve travelled through Europe extensively, and in fact, on my way back from Russia met with Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street with Senator Lugar the then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Iowa Independent: You have a very diverse family. You’ve lived in Indonesia. You are a Christian who has lived in a Muslim country. Can you describe how that kind of foreign policy experience might be more valuable than maybe having had a glass wine on the Seine River in France.
Obama: I love Europe and obviously our relationship with the European Union going forward is going to be critically important. I had an opportunity to meet with now President Sarkozy of France when he came as the candidate here in the United States. I think I was one of two senators that he met with. I think that you’re seeing renewed vitaliy in Europe and it has a desire to flex it’s muscles a lot more in terms of foreign policy. But there a big world out there. And I think that my familiarity with Asia and Africa, not just in an official capacity, but in a very intimate way, my knowledge of the Muslim world, is part of the experience that informed my judgment when I opposed the war in Iraq. It’s part of why I’ve called for negotiations with Iran. When I first said this it was considered to be bucking the conventional wisdom. But now the intelligence estimates have said it’s something we need to do.It’s the same knowledge base that allowed me to insist that we shouldn’t have put all our eggs in Musharaf when it came to Pakistan policy. All these things I think inform my foreign policy vision, one that says we can keep ourselves safe by maintaining the strongest military in the world, but also by reinvigorating our diplomacy and our efforts to affect public opinion around the world, and that’s something I think I could do better than anybody.
Iowa Independent: I’d really like to debunk this for you senator if its not true. One of the lines out there now, and I don’t know where it’s coming from, is that you’d be the first president since Calvin Coolidge to have never travelled to Europe.
Obama: It’s just not true. I’ve been to Europe multiple times. I haven’t taken an official congressional delegation meeting to Europe, but I have to tell you, official delegation meetings to Europe, that’s not how you get to know Europe. You get to know Europe by its people and its culture and its traditions. Obviously, knowing some of the players there is important. This is sort of the silly season in politics where people try to make assertions like this just to underscore their point which is that there are others who have been in Washington far longer than I have. That’s undeniable. I’m not competiting with either Senator Clinton or any of the other senators based on how long they’ve been in Washington. I’m competing on the basis of who can best bring about the changes that are so desperately needed in this country. Part of the reason we’re doing so well in Iowa, part of the reason we’re attracting so much attention from the other candidates, is because people know my election would represent real change and that that’s what I’ve been about all my life.
Iowa Independent: In this last week you really do have a strong push in western Iowa.
Obama: Absolutely. I love western Iowa. We’ve been spending lots of time there. We were thrilled to get The Sioux City Journal endorsement. And we have been travelling quite a bit and I think folks in western Iowa really recoginize we can’t keep on doing the same things over and over again and expecting different outcomes. We’re going to have to bring people together. We can’t spend all of our time with the same partisan bickering that we’ve become accustomed to, that we’ve got to really push against the special interests in Washington that have dominated the agenda, start putting the voice of the American people first so that we can actually provide health-care that people need, and we can start helping young people finance their college educations and change our foreign policy so its not based on bluster but its instead based on a vision for the future.
Iowa Independent: On Social Security, you’ve referred to it as a crisis. Reading a column by Paul Krugman who expressed some concerns …
Obama: I’m familiar with Paul’s arguments.I have said that this is a long-term problem. I’ve never suggested that this is somehow a crisis in the same way that George Bush argues with privatization. There is a long-term problem demographically because the Baby Boom generation is retiring. It’s just common sense. The Social Security actuaries said the same thing. Bill Clinton said the same thing in 1998. I suspect that Paul Krugman in the past has acknowledged as much as well. And what I’ve simply said is that we should deal with it sooner rather than later. The longer we delay solving it, the harder it’s going to be solve, the mroe costly it’s going to be for future generations. Part of my message in running is that we have to start taking responsibility now for solving these problems instead of kicking the can down the road.
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