WSJ

"This Week With George Stephanopoulos."

Stephanopoulos: Vice President Cheney has been giving a series of exit interviews, and he told Mark Knoller of CBS that the Bush counterterrorism policies have definitely made the United States safer. And he added this piece of advice for you.

Cheney: Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric, you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it. Because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead, and it would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they've campaigned against them.

Stephanopoulos: Are you going to take it?
Obama: I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what's going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn't be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So, I've got no quibble with that particular quote. I think if Vice President Cheney were here he and I would have some significant disagreements on some things that we know happened.Pressed for specifics, Obama says only that he thinks waterboarding--which reportedly has been used only a few times, and not recently--is "torture."

As blogger Tom Maguire notes, Stephanopoulos asked Obama "a seemingly easy question"--whether the Army Field Manual will set the limits for all interrogation of terrorists--"but chose to sidestep it." Then the host tried again:
Stephanapoulos: So no more special CIA program?
Obama: I'm not going to lay out a particular program because again, I thought that Dick Cheney's advice was good, which is let's make sure we know everything that's being done.

It is certainly to Obama's credit that he has decided to "know what's going on" rather than "making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric." In an ideal world, he would have abjured the irresponsible campaign rhetoric to begin with. But in imperfect reality, running a dishonest campaign isn't as bad as instituting reckless policies.