Right Voices

300 advisers and no one thought to teach him what committees he serves on, let alone one he chairs?

While speaking in Israel, Obama tried to take credit for work on a bill done by the Senate Banking Committee.   You can see  the video here.  The problem is,  Obama doesn’t belong on the Banking committee,  nor  any of the subcommittees.   Maybe now we know why Barack Obama never called a meeting of his subcommittee on European relations to discuss the NATO effort in Afghanistan.   This point was made in a Salon article back in December 2007:

Doubts about Barack Obama‘s presidential credentials have crystallized during the past two weeks over his stewardship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on European Affairs, which has convened no policy hearings since he took over as its chairman last January. That startling fact, first uncovered by Steve Clemons, who blogs on the Washington Note, prompted acid comment in Europe about the Illinois senator’s failure to visit the continent since assuming the committee post, and even speculation that he had never traveled there except for a short stopover in London.

The article further states:

Ritch points out that as subcommittee chair, Obama could have examined a wide variety of urgent matters, from the role of NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq to European energy policy and European responses to climate change — and of course, the undermining of the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by the Bush administration. There is, indeed, almost no issue of current global interest that would have fallen outside the subcommittee’s purview.

Instead of holding a meeting, he traveled to all 57 states!