For Richard H. who does not have cable, here is the information you requested.

Follow this link to CNN’s links to their video of “The Saddleback Civil Forum on Presidency”.

I haven’t seen it yet, as CNN requires you to accept cookies to view their videos.

Follow this link to a web site that rearranges the video so that the both persons’ answer to each question  are next to each other.

Here is the letter that I sent to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette today.

Barack Obama is the clear choice for President.

He has been a community organizer, a lawyer, and a professor of constitutional law. He has held elected office for 12 years.

In his actions, speeches, and books he has shown a wisdom that I have not seen in a Presidential candidate in my 42 years as a voter. He has an equally essential quality in that he can convey that wisdom to the voters in a way that can inspire them to turn ideas into actions.

His management of his multi-million dollar campaign has shown that he has exceptional management skills.

I like Hillary Clinton too, but she has not shown the same level of wisdom as has Barack Obama. I can better explain the pluses and minuses of Bill Clinton’s free trade policies than she can.

After all this time she can still not explain how she allowed herself to be duped by George Bush, not once but twice. The first example was her trusting his assurances that he would not turn the authorization in the Iraqi resolution into an actual war. The second time was when she voted for the resolution that could have been a prelude for him doing the same thing in Iran.

Whatever her reasons for those votes, if she ends up being a Presidential candidate, she had better come up with an explanation that sounds better than John Kerry’s lame, “I voted for the war before I voted against it.”

For me, the most troubling issue about Hillary Clinton is her inability to come up with a good explanation for her initial vote on the Iraq War resolution.

This reminds me of Kerry’s “I voted for the war before I voted against it.” It is a lame excuse, the opposition keeps hitting you with the issue, and yet you cannot come up with anything better. I came up with better for Kerry. You’d think he would have had his staff working full time on better wording.

Her claim that she had assurances from George Bush that he would not do exactly what he ended up doing are not helping her.  When most of the rest of us could see his transparent lies, why was she so easily deceived?

In Clinton’s situation, I can also come up with a better excuse for her vote. She should have said, “At the time of the vote we all thought that Hussein might have WMD. I knew that Bush’s assurances that he would not use the resolution to start a war were lies. I was hoping that Hussein would back down before Bush would go completely bonkers. There were no good options to choose at that time. I had to choose the one that I thought would be least bad. If I had known that Hussein did not have WMD, it would have been easy to choose to put the leash on George Bush instead. It turns out that Barack was correct in figuring out that George Bush was a bigger threat than Sadam Hussein. That does not prove that he will always be able to guess right.”

Had she not recently voted on the similar enabling resolution for Bush on Iran, the case above would be easier to believe.

If she cannot come up with an excellent answer that explains her votes with all the time she has had to prepare, how is she going to handle this issue in the general election’s more hostile environment?