Candy Crowley interviewed Senator Barack Obama for The Situation Room today. Transcript follows…

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Senator Barack Obama is accusing some of his Democratic presidential rivals of trying to rewrite history on Iraq. He’s very publicly trying to remind voters today he opposed the war from day one while Senator Hillary Clinton and others did not.

Let’s go to our senior political correspondent, Candy Crowley. She’s in Chicago. You had an interview, Candy, earlier today with Senator Barack Obama. Give us some of the headlines.

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SR. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, I did ask him about some of the criticism from rival camps and from other critics of Obama who say, yes, he was out there early, before the war began, criticizing the war. But since then, they say his record has not been quite so anti-war as he would have you believe.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CROWLEY: I want to talk about your Iraq speech, because have you also

said since then that you’re not sure what you would have done had you

been in the Senate because you weren’t privy to the intelligence.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The only time when I

said I’m not sure what I would do if I were in the Senate was right

before the Democratic convention, when we had two nominees that

obviously I did not want to be criticizing right before they got up and

received the nomination.

CROWLEY: But you didn’t mean it?

OBAMA: So — well, no. What I’m suggesting is, everybody had difficult

choices to make. And I — and these were difficult choices.

I made the right choice. And I think that is relevant not to the past,

but to the future, because in this campaign, we have seen emerge the

question of, who has got the experience to lead the country during

difficult times? And what I’m absolutely confident about is that how

we’ve made decisions on the most important foreign policy issue facing

us in this generation, I did not only oppose the war, but laid out

reasons that have proven to be prescient over time. And I think that

says something about my judgment and my ability to assess the challenges

that we are going face in the future.

CROWLEY: We see internally in the polls when you ask who is best able to

end this war, lead America and a new foreign policy, they’ll say Hillary

Clinton.

OBAMA: I think that Senator Clinton has been effective in trying to blur

the distinctions. And it’s our job to make these distinctions clear to

the American people, because it really ends up speaking to how we are

going to make decisions in the future, how we’re going to be making

decisions about a series of significant threats and how we are going to

make decisions about getting out of Iraq, which I think is going to be a

top priority during the course of this election.

CROWLEY: I want to also ask about something you said recently, which was

that you couldn’t commit to having U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013,

which would be the end of your first term.

What does that say to all of the people who thought last year they voted

to get out of Iraq?

OBAMA: What I said is that I would retain a very limited number of

troops to carry out functions that we carry out in other areas of the

world that aren’t war zones — protecting our diplomatic and civilian

corps, our embassy, and having a strike force which might be an Iraq war

in the region to target al Qaeda in Iraq.

CROWLEY: Isn’t that war?

OBAMA: But the point is that we are going to have the need to engage in

potential military actions in the region, against targets in the region.

That is very different from having a set of troops in the midst of a

civil war.

CROWLEY: How many troops you would leave on the ground in the — in that

— how many will be there?

OBAMA: That will depend on the situation at the time. And that is the

thing that I cannot guarantee.

CROWLEY: A campaign question. You’ve raised oodles of money. You get

great crowds. It hasn’t shown up in the polls. You need to close the

deal. Time is a wasting, as they say.

OBAMA: What I am focused on is making sure that people understand the

kind of president I would be, the kind of leadership that I want to

bring on providing health insurance to all Americans, making sure that

we’ve got a serious agenda for reforming our public schools. That we are

dealing with the urgent crisis of global warming, and that people

understand I want to take our foreign policy in an entirely new direction.

CROWLEY: Haven’t you said all those these things before, though? I’m

just wondering why it hasn’t caught on.

OBAMA: Well, you know, I recognize that there has been a sense that this

campaign has been lasting in perpetuity. But the American people are

just now starting to focus on it.

We just went up for first time in New Hampshire on television. We have

got three months of campaigning before the first Iowa caucus, and then

we’ve got a number of primaries and caucuses after that.

So we feel very comfortable with the pace that we’re on, and part of the

reason that you are seeing us raise more small donations than all the

other candidates combined. Part of the reason that you are seeing these

enormous crowds and terrific organization on the ground in these early

states is because the message does resonate when people hear it. Our job

is obviously to make sure…

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CROWLEY: As for fund-raising, clearly Hillary Clinton has outpaced

Barack Obama for the first time this year. The Obama camp tosses that

out, pointing to the 350,000 donors they have had so far. And also

saying, look, when you take the year in its totality, we have raised

more than she has without taking money from a campaign — which Hillary

Clinton has done — and without raising money from lobbyists — Wolf.

BLITZER: This last quarter, though, she had more individual contributors

to her campaign than he had to his. Is that right?

CROWLEY: Right, as far as we can tell. And that’s right, but they’re

sort of focusing on totality of the first three quarters. You know,

statistics are all in how you read them.

BLITZER: Candy Crowley in Chicago for us.

Thanks very much.