Informal Obama adviser steps aside over Hamas talks

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May 10, 2008
Check Point

On McCain, Obama and a Hamas Link

By LARRY ROHTER

In the clearest indication yet of how he intends to confront Senator Barack Obama on foreign policy issues in the general election, Senator John McCain on Friday again portrayed the Democratic contender as being the favorite of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, and implied that he would also be friendly with Iran, a Hamas ally.
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Mr. Obama has not let attacks go unanswered. On Thursday, he replied by saying that Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, was “losing his bearings” and engaging in “smear” tactics. “My policy toward Hamas has been no different than his,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on CNN.

Mr. McCain’s attacks are part of a broader effort by his campaign to depict Mr. Obama, the leader in the delegate count in the Democratic race for president, as inexperienced and naïve on foreign policy in general and soft on terrorism and its sponsors specifically. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama has also had to fight a related perception, one encouraged by his Democratic rivals, that his support for Israel is also weak.

For his part, Mr. McCain has taken pride in the enmity with which he regards Hamas. “I think that the people should understand that I will be Hamas’s worst nightmare,” he said late last month in a conference call with conservative bloggers.
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Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state. Mr. Obama believes “that engagement at the presidential level, at the appropriate time and with the appropriate preparation, can be used to leverage the change we need,” Dr. Rice said. “But nobody said he would initiate contacts at the presidential level; that requires due preparation and advance work.”

Mr. Obama has been clear in making a distinction between his willingness to talk “not just to countries we like, but those we don’t,” as he puts it, and Hamas and other political movements similar to it. “Hamas is not a state,” Mr. Obama told a Jewish group last month. “Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
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That is not a new position for Mr. Obama. In 2006, he, like Mr. McCain, was a co-sponsor of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which called on “members of the international community to avoid contact with and refrain from financially supporting the terrorist organization Hamas” until it met all of the same requirements that Mr. Obama enumerated again on Thursday.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/us/politics/10mccain.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print