The speech that arguably won Barack Obama the presidency was delivered six years before he ran for the White House and four years before he reached Congress. In October 2002, Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, delivered a blistering speech against the impending war in Iraq. 'I don't oppose war in all circumstances,' he declared at a Chicago rally. 'What I do oppose is a dumb war.' Years later, that stance would distinguish Obama from Hillary Clinton, the initial front-runner in the 2008 Democratic primary. The two contenders were largely in accord on domestic policy, which made their differences on foreign policy loom large. Clinton, like most Senate Democrats, had voted to authorize the Iraq War. But with that decision now deeply unpopular on the left, Obama leaned into his early opposition. His campaign produced supercuts of his anti-war sentiments over the years and even filmed supporters reciting the lines of his 2002 speech, in one of the earliest examples of viral...
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