Obama: Foreign family experience helps

[babylonsister]

Obama: Foreign family experience helps

By MIKE GLOVER
Associated Press Writer


CLARION, Iowa (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama said Monday his childhood experience in Asia and his family in Kenya give him a greater foreign policy understanding than politicians who merely take junkets to other countries.

The first-term Illinois senator is frequently asked whether he has the foreign policy credentials to be president, and he faced the question again at a town hall meeting in Clarion.

"I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia," said Obama, who was born in Hawaii and spent four years in Indonesia. "My father is from Kenya. That's where I got my name. He's passed away now, but I still have family."

"A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs is not what I just studied in school. It's actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live."

Obama contrasted that with tightly controlled congressional trips overseas.

"You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador's house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance."

Obama said foreign policy decisions are rooted in an understanding of foreign cultures, and he argued he has a much keener perception than his rivals.

more...

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBAMA_IOWA?SITE=CONGRA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[MNDemNY]

1. Even I can say, that is an asset. Really.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

2. It's the number one reason I support him

Electing him President will be the best amends we can make to the world for GWB. This is a person who understands the Muslim community and is comfortable interacting with people from all over the world.

[ClarkUSA]

3. Seymour Hersh thinks that makes Obama the best presidential candidate.

Barack Obama represents "the only hope for the US in the Muslim world," according to Pulitzer-prize winning investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh. Because Obama's father was a Muslim, he "could lead a reconciliation between the Muslim countries
and the US." With any of the other candidates as president, Hersh said, "we're facing two or three decades of problems in the
Mideast, with 1.2 billion Muslims."

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/?pid=252300

Hersh is the reporter that broke both the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib torture stories to the world, so his opinion carries
no small amount of weight.

[babylonsister]

4. That's high praise indeed-imo, being a Hersh fan. Thanks. nt

[ClarkUSA]

9. I felt the same way.

Another reason to feel good about supporting Obama. Hersh is incorruptible.

[MethuenProgressive]

5. He's flip flopping on whether family experience matters?

Growing up in Hawaii somehow has value?

edit: spell check had electronic brain fart

[babylonsister]

6. Give it up. He has the advantage of growing up in a different culture

unlike his counterparts. How is that flip-flopping? You're desperation is showing. And what's family expedience?

[MethuenProgressive]

7. How many years? At what ages?

"And what's family expedience?"
That there is what spell check does when you use it, but then don't look close at what's it done to your typing.

[babylonsister]

8. Read the OP if you're that curious, and you didn't answer my question. How

do you get flip-flopping out of living in a different culture? :crazy: