Look, one thing I'm very confident about is my judgment in foreign policy is, I believe, better than anyone else in this race, Republican or Democrat.
"And I don't base that simply on the fact that I was right on the war in Iraq. But if you look at how I approached the problem. What I was drawing on was a set of experiences that come from a life of living overseas, having family overseas, being able to see the world through the eyes of people outside our borders.
"The notion that somehow from Washington you get this vast foreign policy experience is illusory.
I'm not saying Obama's judgment about his judgment is necessarily correct, just that the very serious foreign policy people in Washington keep, you know, getting it wrong. The foreign policy establishment has its own arbitrary parameters of debate which it imposes on political candidates, a sort of legacy of decades of debates piled on other debates, which often have little relationship to reality. It tries to impose those rules onto candidates, declaring this or that a "foreign policy gaffe," even though it's often only a gaffe to the very serious people who brought us George Bush's excellent Iraqi adventure.