What Obama's Senate votes reveal

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On tax policy, Obama voted in 2006 against a bill that extends, through 2010, the cuts in capital gains and dividends tax rates enacted by Congress in 2003.

He complained that the bill would “give the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of all Americans a tax cut that is more than four thousand times larger than most middle-class Americans will get.”

He also voted “no” in 2006 on repeal of the tax on inherited wealth, the estate tax, which is scheduled to rise to 55 percent in 2011.

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The other side of the fiscal coin is spending. Outlays on rapidly growing entitlement programs, such as Medicare, now account for 44 percent of all federal outlays.

Obama voted against a measure by Sen. John Ensign R-Nev., to require Medicare beneficiaries with annual incomes over $160,000 to pay higher premiums for their prescription drugs in Medicare Part D.

If Obama is elected, Iraq and the future of the nation's military forces there will dominate his presidency.

In June of 2006 Obama voted against a measure offered by Feingold and Kerry that would have required President Bush to withdraw most United States troops from Iraq by July 1, 2007.

Most Democrats joined him in voting “no” as only 13 Democrats (and no Republicans) voted 13 for it.

But in September 20, 2007, Obama was one of 28 Democrats voting for a Feingold measure that ordered Bush to begin withdrawing most U.S. forces from Iraq within 90 days.

'Yes' on Iraq funding cutoff
The bill would have cut off funding for the Iraq deployment by June 30, 2008. Feingold’s measure would have allowed U.S. troops to stay in Iraq to “conduct targeted operations, limited in duration and scope, against members of al Qaeda” and other terrorist groups.

No Republican senators voted for the Feingold measure, while 18 Democrats, several of them from battleground states such as Missouri (Sen. Claire McCaskill), Virginia (Sen. Jim Webb), Florida (Sen. Bill Nelson) and Colorado (Salazar) voted against it.

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Just two hours before that vote, Obama missed another Senate vote, this one to denounce a full-page New York Times ad run by the anti-war group Moveon.org mocking the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”

In that legislation, the Senate voted to “condemn any effort to attack the honor and integrity of General Petraeus” and “to specifically repudiate the unwarranted personal attack on General Petraeus by the liberal activist group Moveon.org.”

The measure passed 72 to 25, with 22 Democrats voting for it and 25 Democrats opposing it.

And, again the battleground state Democrats such as McCaskill, Webb, and Salazar voted for the measure.

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