How Barack Obama’s decision not to fight the war in Iraq changed his campaign.

The year is 2002 and Barack Obama is a candidate for the United States Senate. He puts his political life on the line by him opposing war in Iraq.

But what if Barack Obama had taken the easier path of going along with the conventional thinkers in Washington? and chose to support the war in Iraq.

The first thing that would be different for Barack Obama would have been his inability to separate himself from the other presidential candidates. The Democratic Party would have been faced with a crowed group of similar thinking candidates. The more people running for office, the harder the fight becomes for campaign funds. In 2006 and 2007 Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear front runner. The Clinton campaign had the money and support of the Democratic Party. The Obama campaign would not have been able to generate funds in such high numbers if he had supported the war in Iraq. The Obama presidential run would have be faced with going up against an established Clinton political machine, and would not have had the resources to put up a decent fight.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each have voting records that show that they have both voted along the Democratic Party line. Therefore the voting record could not be used as an issue to show their differences, if anything it would show their similarities.To the average American, it would have appeared then, that all the potential presidential candidates were in support of the war.

The Obama campaign would have faced an entirely different a new set of political problems. In Barack Obama’s 2002 Speech Against the Iraq War speech he stated “After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears I supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again”.

This speech was a cry out against the war. Because of that speech Obama gained the support of many independents. So if Obama was with the Bush administration’s decision on the war in Iraq, many of his best speeches would have never been penned.

Obama also faced questions about his lack of political experience; his answer remained simple. Obama stated that when there was a time for an important political decision to be made, he made the right one. The fact that Obama was the only presidential candidate who never supported the war became the foundation of his campaign, so without the anti-war stance he would have been forced to find another hot-topic issue to campaign on.

The world would be different if Barack Obama had decided to be a supporter of the war.The world would have lost the spark of hope and change that Barack Obama started around the world with his political campaign. The 2008 presidential campaign would have also been different. The first thing that would be different is that Hillary Clinton would have been the clear front runner for the Democratic Party. The campaign would be a forgone conclusion that Hilary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee. As a result of Hillary Clinton having a big early lead in the election the interest would have waned.

We would have been faced with Barak Obama exiting from the campaign.

Without Obama as competition for Hillary to compete with, Clinton would have sweepts into the general election as the democratic nominee for president of the United States of America. And if the polls of a Hillary Clinton/John McCain contest were correct, we would have witnessed John McCain as the next President of the United States of America.

The way that the young voting demographic in America joined the democratic process has been another way in which the Obama effect has been felt. The participation of young Americans is a direct result of Barack Obama running for president. The election without Obama would then have been being like all the past elections. The next president would have been a
white male without question.

It was Barack Obama’s campaign that brought the youth of all races into the election process. That demonstrates that if Obama had supported the war in Iraq he would have come across as a run of the mill candidate, without any new ideas. The war was the main issue that united Barack Obama with the young voters of today. The younger generation in America saw Obama agreeing with their assessment that this war was a mistake from the start.

The main theme of all the candidates in the 2008 presidential election is change. This is a message that was gleaned from the Obama Plan. The country might have lost a generation of young voters if Obama had not stood against the war.A great nation may have lost its way if not for Obama.
The campaign trail for Obama would have been a lot shorter if he had not shown the courage to make a stand against the war from the start. If Obama’s campaign had been shorter, then all the minorities and young Americans that joined his campaign may have been left out of the democratic process.