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Next Tuesday is a high holy day in the calendar for Barack Obama supporters, who will mark the five-year anniversary of the moment their presidential candidate gave his first speech against the war in Iraq.
Obama was just an Illinois state senator that day in 2002, when he went to a rally in Daley Plaza at the invitation of Chicago Democratic doyenne Bettylu Saltzman and called the president’s impending military action “a dumb war.”
Not that many politicians were saying things like that at the time, most notably not the other people who would end up running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. Now that public and political sentiment has turned on the war, it’s a distinction Obama, today a U.S. senator, mentions rather often.
So it comes as no surprise that the Obama for America campaign will mark next Tuesday’s anniversary with some fanfare, with a set of rallies scheduled to take place in several cities around the country. Obama will deliver a foreign policy address in Chicago that day.
No word yet on what it will say, but it’s likely to allude to the 2002 speech in which Obama warned the war could lead to “a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.”
It will probably also be critical of Washington types who voted to authorize the war.
The rallies are set for 17 cities, from Tempe, Arizona to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Unless something changes, though, the Obama speech will not take place at the original Daley Plaza site.
Chicago’s “Science in the City” reserved the space a long time ago for its kick-off, and its organizers say it’s still on.