page_title: Barack Obama 2008 presidential primary campaign
section_title: Second half 2007
hierarchical_section_title: Barack Obama 2008 presidential primary campaign / Pre-primary campaign developments / Second half 2007
caption_attribution_description: Barack Obama in South Carolina
context_page_description: On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then-junior United States Senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Springfield, Illinois. Obama announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol building, where Abraham Lincoln had delivered his "House Divided" speech. Obama was the main challenger, along with John Edwards, to front-runner Hillary Clinton for much of 2007. He had only recently emerged as a national figure in Democratic politics, having delivered the DNC keynote address just three years prior and won his Senate election shortly thereafter.
  Obama's initial victory in the Iowa caucus in January 2008 helped bring him to national prominence from a crowded field of Democratic challengers. Obama benefited from early support from prominent Democrats including Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy, and his campaign began to trade a series of hard-fought state wins with Clinton through Super Tuesday, in which Obama had great success in large rural states and Clinton was nearly as dominant in high-population coastal areas.
context_section_description: On August 1 when making his foreign policy speech Obama created controversy by declaring that the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, with or without the consent of the Pakistani government. He stated that if elected, "If we have actionable intelligence about high value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." ABC News described the policy speech as "counterintuitive" and commented on how "one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush"  Obama ultimately followed through on this statement of policy four years later when, as President, he ordered the operation to enter Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden.
  After weeks of discourse surrounding the policy, Obama said there was "misreporting" of his comments, stating that, "I never called for an invasion of Pakistan or Afghanistan." He clarified that rather than a surge in the number of troops in Iraq, there needed to be a "diplomatic surge" and that if there were "actionable intelligence reports" showing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the U.S. troops as a last resort should enter and try to capture terrorists. That would happen, he added, only if "the Pakistani government was unable or unwilling" to go after the terrorists.
  As Democratic debates took place during the summer, Obama received at best mixed notices for his efforts. Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said, "He slips into this tendency, which he probably learned as president of the Harvard Law Review, to overstate his premises before he states his position. In politics, you do the opposite of what you do in the Law Review—you state your position, then say your premises—if you ever get to them." Commentator Eleanor Clift said that, "Obama is almost too cerebral for the sound-bite world of modern politics, but that's part of his appeal."
  During a campaign stop in October 2007, a reporter inquired as to why Obama had stopped wearing a lapel pin of the American flag, which he had started wearing after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and his response was that it had come to feel like "a substitute for true patriotism." This led to discussion on the cable news channels and was covered by satirists such as Stephen Colbert, who had an ongoing disagreement with the Fox & Friends assertion that "this is America, and if you want to be president of America, it might be [sic] behoove him to wear an American flag." Commentator Bill Maher, who was highly critical of such questions about Obama's patriotism and called it a "non-story" nonetheless referred to the incident as "[t]he first genuine controversy of the presidential campaign."
  In mid-late October 2007, Obama came under fire from the Human Rights Campaign and others for a South Carolina gospel music campaign tour that featured singer Donnie McClurkin, who states that he is ex-gay and that homosexuality is a "curse [that runs against] the intention of God." Obama said in response that, "I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin's views." While not replacing McClurkin, the campaign added a gay minister to the tour.
  As fall 2007 continued, Obama fell further behind Clinton in national polls. In late October 2007, two months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Obama began directly charging his top rival with failing to clearly state her political positions. This shift in approach attracted much media commentary; The New York Times' Adam Nagourney wrote that, "Obama has appeared to struggle from the start of this campaign with how to marry what he has promised to be a new approach to politics—free of the partisan bitterness that has marked presidential campaigns for so long—with what it takes to actually win a presidential race." In an early-anticipated October 30 Democratic debate at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Clinton suffered a poor debate performance under cross-examinatio
caption: Obama speaking at a rally in Conway, South Carolina on August 3, 2007.[37]
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