For all that I support Obama in his contest with Clinton, it’s well to remember that he’s often not the profile in courage he’s portrayed to be. He may not even be the best Senator from Illinois.

Writing for The Nation, Alexander Cockburn remembers how (in June, 2005) Senator Richard Durbin courageously compared interrogation and detention policies at Gitmo to Nazi and KGB practices — and how Obama characterized that statement as a “mistake”:

The right wing jumped all over Durbin, and he paid the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate floor. His colleague the junior senator from Illinois duly rose to speak. Now the topic here, remember, was not the candidacy-endangering one of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man eager to grasp every nettle, tug it up by the roots and lash at the face of Empire with it. This was Senator Dick Durbin, who had quite properly denounced insupportable conduct by US government personnel. Courage should have required Obama to support Durbin.

But Obama is careful, far more than he is courageous. In this instance he lent a supportive hand to his beleaguered colleague Durbin by shoving Durbin’s head under the waves with the thrice-repeated use of the word “mistake.” “We have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other across the aisle, and that is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while…and what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of how we’ve operated and interacted with people, will override whatever particular mistake we make.”

In the above, I’ve added the link to Obama’s remarks in the Congressional Record; context doesn’t improve anything here. Indeed, he added,

I am grateful [Durbin] had the courage to stand up and acknowledge that he should have said what he said somewhat differently.

For my part, I saw that episode almost 180 degrees differently. I remember how impressed I was that Durbin said, after reading an FBI agent’s account of mistreatment at Guantanamo,

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings.

And I remember how disappointed I was when he felt compelled to basically apologize for a statement that was entirely reasonable.*

Over the weekend, I was characterized as being “cool on Obama.” Guilty as charged — and this is just the kind of thing that keeps me that way. It’s not too far-fetched to see shades of a Lieberman (who Obama endorsed over Lamont) or a David Broder in this kind of pseudo-evenhandedness and overemphasis of how to carefully, carefully say something rather than on what to say or whether to say it.

Obama is attempting the neat trick of making himself the privileged arbiter of what he calls a “national conversation.” I can’t blame him — I’d like to be the privileged arbiter of the national conversation myself. But I would expect that to mean really standing by people who are saying true things that need to be said, whether or not what they’re saying seems divisive or inopportune.

Obama’s warning, in the same statement, about getting “ginned up by interest groups and blogs and the Internet” notwithstanding, the national conversation can’t just be about how this is the most wonderful nation ever and how it’s getting more wonderful all the time. If Obama sees honest, unflinching (at least at first) statements like Durbin’s as mistakes, then it looks like those horrid interest groups and blogs will need to keep after him, too, should he become our next president.

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* The “entirely reasonable” link is to my 6/23/05 post “Look Pretty Similar To Me”, juxtaposing Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib testimony with accounts of treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, SS, and Stalin’s gulag henchmen.