For many Obama supporters, the number one reason given for their support during the primary season was his stance against the Iraq war. That was the defining difference between him and the other top two candidates, Clinton and Edwards. Despite Edward's apology for that vote, his judgement was considered forever tainted by not seeing what was so obvious to so many of us and trusting that Bush would do as he promised and go to war as a last resort.

As an Edwards supporter, I defended his vote on the war, though I too had questions about his judgement--certainly it wasn't a vote I would have made. My brother, an ardent Obama supporter, said it was that one vote that made it impossible for him to support Edwards. I countered that Obama's opposition to the war did not put him at political risk, and his subsequent votes in favor of funding made him as complicit as Clinton, Edwards, or any other Senator who voted in favor of the war resolution.

I think if anything has become obvious during the last couple of weeks, it's that we can now be fairly certain how Obama would have voted on the war resolution had he actually been in the Senate. The path he has chosen on FISA, the death penalty, campaign finance, and gun control shows that political opportunism and expediency would have trumped any moral convictions he had about the war. That doesn't make him worse than the other candidates who supported the war, it makes him the same, which is exactly what so many of his supporters said he wasn't.