“…so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn’t have the benefit of U.S. intelligence.”

Does this put him on equal footing with those in the Senate that didn’t read the N.I.E.?

If most people, or even more people, would bother to do a little homework on Obama, they would feel as many of us do - that there is no longer any reason to trust what he says at any given moment.  They would be especially wary of his version of history, which always stars himself as the altruistic and principled hero.

Altruistic?  Ha!  Maybe they changed that definition while I wasn't looking.

Principled?  Ditto.

Do you know that he re-recorded his famous anti-war speech because there was no contemporaneous recording of it?  Complete with crowd noise and the microphone echo.  Bamboozle much?

I have spent seven years listening to lies and misstatements as the Constitution was shredded with the help of loyal and power-hungry followers, as spineless Democrats cowered in fear of being called "weak."  Anyone else see the irony there?

And Obama saying critical things about Sen. Clinton means he's bad.

how is the delegate math looking now, did i scare u enough.

BHO:

I'm always careful to say that I was not in the Senate, so perhaps the reason I thought it was such a bad idea was that I didn't have the benefit of U.S. intelligence.

So this question stood out:

How old were you when you came to the church?

I was, I must have been twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? And, as I said in the book, look, there are still passages that I read in the Bible, that I say, Well, this doesn't make any sense.

There's a hotel, I think it's the Capitol Hilton, in Washington; and downstairs, where there are a lot of banquet halls, there's a whole row of all the presidents. You walk by the forty-three that have been there and you realize there are only about ten who you have any idea what they did.

There are many ways in which Patrick's run and Obama's are similar: the optimism, the constant presence of the candidate's biography, the combination of a crusading message of reform with the candidate's natural pragmatism, the insistence that normal political categories did not apply, even the same, unofficial slogan, shouted from the crowds "Yes. We. Can!" But most essential is the way in which both of these campaigns came to use the symbolism that accompanies their candidates? race, not by apologizing for it or ignoring it but by embracing the constant attention paid to the historic nature of the candidacy itself. The Democratic media consultant David Eichenbaum, whose candidate, Chris Gabrieli, lost to Patrick and Axelrod in Massachusetts, told me: "What they were able to do in the Patrick campaign was similar to what they've been able to do with Obama. The campaign managed to energize the grass roots, but there was a sense of idealism and hope and being able to break that historic barrier that was very unifying and reached out beyond liberals or the base. It became a movement that took on a life of its own."

And yet Patrick is a bust in Massachusetts. Is it possible that the Massachusetts primary was a referendum on Patrick because they had already heard it and thought it a bust if not a fraud?

But, again, we were in different circumstances at that time [when he made his big anti-war speech]: I was running for the U.S. Senate, she had to take a vote, and casting votes is always a difficult test.