The problem is that any politician who had had the guts to oppose funding that war from the beginning would long since have been marginalized and shut out by the main party power blocs in Congress...by both of them. As with Kucinich. As with Ron Paul. (the other Republican pols were laughing when he stated plain and obvious truths about the war in those debates!) Such people who buck the establishment can get a lot of help from the ordinary public and from private individual donors...but NOT from the party machine or the big lobbyists who control most of the campaign financing.

So if you were a politician with any real hopes of getting the backing you needed from the party machine to get elected president farther on down the road, then of course you would not vote against funding the war. To do so would be to write your own obituary as a viable presidential candidate.

So to have voted against funding the war would have taken immense courage and a determination to stick to your principles even if this would basically destroy your political career.

That's a bit of a conundrum, don't you think?

The people who most wish to change things are the people who cannot afford to act on principle unless they are prepared to be shut out by the powers that be.

That's the position Kucinich is in, and the position Ron Paul is in. To a much lesser extent, it's the position Edwards is in.

If Obama wanted a realistic shot at becoming president, he pretty well HAD to vote to fund the war, seems to me, and the same goes for Hillary Clinton....regardless of what they really believe! That's how the game is played on Capitol Hill. You either vote with the Big Machine for war...or you get marginalized and shut out of the Big Game called "Election 2008".

So what the heck are they to do?

This doesn't change the fact that the Democrats could have acted as a united party and brought that war to an end after 2006...if they were not run by the corporate interests who don't want the American occupation to end.

What does Obama really think about ending the war? Who knows. But will it make any difference in the end to the corporate-run policy? Again, who knows?

If he does intend to honor his promises, he had better watch his back...and have plenty of security people around him whom he can trust implicitly.