Flashback - Obama and McCain Debate Cuba - March 2008

[Median Democrat]

A year ago, Obama and McCain were trading attacks on Cuba with McCain criticizing Obama's stated intention to try to change relations between the two countries, and engage Cuba diplomatically. So, for better or worse, you are getting what you voted for with President Obama with respect to his promises on a different diplomatic approach.

The question is whether this will cost Obama votes in Florida in 2012.

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/20/1045253.aspx

/snip

McCain painted Obama's stance towards the Cuban regime as a soft undermining of real progress in repairing the relationship of the two countries. "These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba's dictators -- there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in US policy," he said. "That's what they think."

The Arizona senator's remarks were enthusiastically received by the group of mainly Cuban-Americans who attended the speech; they gleefully booed the notion of face-to-face unconditional meetings between Cuba's leader and an American president, and they rewarded McCain's call for free elections with a standing ovation.

But Democrats charge that McCain's bright line against negotiations with Cuba has hardened since he ran against George Bush here in the 2000 primary. Then, as now, McCain laid out conditions under which he would consider meeting with Cuba's leaders, but his tone -- these critics say -- was one with less stringent requirements for some of those concessions, particularly his call that free elections in Cuba be a prerequisite to normalized relations between the two countries.

/snip