I don't mean to go too hard on jurassicpork, who has many good things to say in this post, which is worth reading (via Avedon), but when it comes to the title ("I Didn't Vote for Neville Chamberlain"), I do have a nit to pick. Er, dude, you totally voted for Neville Chamberlain. That's not something that Obama is just now revealing about himself. It was one of his selling points. He campaigned on being Neville Chamberlain, promising to bring peace in our time.

Obama in one of his 2007 ads (emphasis mine):

We are in a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. The planet is in peril. The dream that so many generations fought for feels as if it's slowly slipping away. And that is why the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do. That's why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do. America, our moment is now. I don't want to spend the next year, or the next four years, refighting the same fights we had in the 1990s. I don't want to pit red America against blue America. I want to be president of the UNITED States of America.

It was the theme of Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic puff piece cover story praising Obama. Here's Sullivan:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

It was an underlying theme in David Brooks' endorsement of Obama in the Democratic Primary:

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

In fact, not "refighting" the 1990s was such a campaign theme, that Barney Frank took him to task for it.*

Here's the thing - the only way to avoid a war the other side is intent on waging is to do whatever is necessary to appease the other side. If you aren't willing to do that, you're going to be in a war. So unless you believed that the GOP had changed and wasn't interested in continuing the war of the 1990s or that Obama was lying (a particular favorite belief among some progressives ), it was pretty clear that Obama, at the very least had Neville Chamberlain tendencies when it came to fighting the right.** Any doubt about Obama's sincerity on that score, should've vanished as Obama repeatedly praised the Republicans on the other side of those wars during the Democratic primary.

Now maybe Chamberlain can turn into Churchill (I tend to doubt it, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong). But who Obama can become is a different question than who he is.

So I've got Obama's back on this one. He's only doing exactly what he said he'd do - try to end those awful wars with Republicans. That doing so means accepting terms liberals won't like, well, Obama has also been pretty clear on what he thinks about liberals.

* You know, when people on the other side of the war praise your guy for being able to end the war while your comrade in arms calls foul, that's kind of a red flag. I'm just saying.

** Obama has, of course, never shown the slightest bit of hesitation in using any tactic to beat a fellow Democrat.