Candidates clash on foreign-policy 'judgment'

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By Christina Bellantoni

ST. LOUIS | The presidential nominees slammed one another Sunday on foreign-policy judgment as Sen. Barack Obama promised an intense economic focus for the remainder of the election season.

Republican nominee Sen. John McCain said Mr. Obama "does not have the judgment necessary" to be president.

Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, said on ABC's "This Week" that voters will realize choosing Mr. McCain will bring "the same kind of government."

Host George Stephanopoulos pressured Mr. Obama to say Mr. McCain was "right" because he supported President Bush's surge of troops to Iraq, while Mr. Obama opposed it, since the Democrat has acknowledged the surge has helped reduce violence there.

"It's interesting to me why people are so focused on what's happened in the last year-and-a-half, and not on the previous five," he said, adding he thinks Mr. McCain "insists on continuing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

He said that Mr. McCain is resisting the Iraqi government's readiness to take responsibility, "even at a time when George Bush is prepared to say that we need to have some sort of time frame or timetable."

The Illinois senator stressed it is a matter of judgment, a similar argument he made to defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary, because he opposed the war as a distraction from the war in Afghanistan from the onset, while she voted for it.

"If the question is, has the surge done much better than we expected — in combination with these other factors in reducing violence — the answer is yes," Mr. Obama said.

He said more important for the voters to decide is "the judgment to be made at the time the surge was put forward by the Bush administration," and said his Republican rival chose "to continue to give an open-ended, blank check to George Bush, without any strategy for political reconciliation," while his own stance was "to try to pressure this administration to come up with a more coherent, cohesive plan for how we are going to wind this war down."

With fewer than 60 days until the Nov. 4 election, the political shows highlighted Republican vice-presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin's absence from the Sunday circuit. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. suggested on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Mrs. Palin has been "sequestered" from the media.