July 23, 2008
Surging For Obama
National Review: McCain's Rearguing Of The Surge Is Counterproductive
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Play CBS Video Video Candidates' Goals For Mideast "CBS Exclusive": Barack Obama and John McCain each describe how they would handle the war on terror, including how they plan to stabilize Iraq and quell the insurgency in Afghanistan.
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Video Preview: McCain Critiques Obama John McCain tells Katie Couric that Barack Obama's failure to acknowledge the success of the troop surge shows that he would rather "lose a war than a campaign." Watch the interview tonight on the CBS Evening News.
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Video Obama's Big Day In Israel Sen. Barack Obama continues his oversees tour with a campaign-crucial day of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Sheila MacVicar reports.
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Photo Essay Obama in the Mideast Democratic presidential hopeful holds talks in Iraq, Afghanistan
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"Senator Barack Obama didn’t support the surge, wanted to pull out, said that it would fail. I supported it when it was the toughest thing to do. I believe that my record on national security and keeping this country safe is there. And the American people will examine our records, and I will win.”
That’s John McCain explaining why he’ll win.
He’s wrong.
He’s leading a loud chorus of conservatives and Republicans desperate to make the surge the defining issue of the campaign.
In an editorial for the conservative Weekly Standard, Fred Kagan (the primary intellectual author of the surge strategy) wrote: “It would be hard to design a better test for the job of commander in chief than the real-life test senators John McCain and Barack Obama have undergone in the last two years.”
It’s understandable why so many Republicans see the surge as an ideal political battleground. Outside foreign policy, McCain’s standing with the GOP base is shaky. The party doesn’t have many policy wins to brag about. And Obama doesn’t have much of a record to attack. Also, many hawks - often called neoconservatives - see the surge as vindication that they were right about the feasibility of the Iraq invasion from the beginning. It was President Bush’s bungling that was wrong, they say, not the war itself.
Whatever the merits of all that, there’s a problem. As political analysis, it’s nonsense.
Yes, McCain heroically pushed for the surge when the war was at its most unpopular point. Even more impressive, he favored a change in strategy back when the war was popular.
Within months of the invasion, McCain was calling for more troops and the head of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Later, when the Iraqi civil war erupted, al Qaeda in Iraq metastasized and Iran mounted a clandestine surge of its own, McCain doubled down; he argued that we couldn’t afford to lose and proposed a revised counterinsurgency strategy for victory. That was the same month that Obama introduced the “Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007.”
That’s great stuff for McCain’s biographers. But the catch-22 is that the more the surge succeeds, the more advantageous it is for Obama.
Voters don’t care about the surge; they care about the war. Americans want it to be over - and in a way they can be proud of.
Richard Nixon didn’t win in 1968 by second-guessing LBJ about the mess in Vietnam; he ran on getting us out with honor. McCain is great when talking about honor, but the getting-us-out part is where he gets tongue-tied. Obama, meanwhile, talks about leaving Iraq as though Americans don’t care about honor. That may have worked in the early primaries, but it won’t in the general election. Americans don’t like to lose wars.
Politically, the surge is a bit like the Supreme Court’s recent decision affirming the constitutional right to own a gun. Obama’s position on gun rights, a miasma of murky equivocation, would hurt him if gun control were a big issue this year. It isn’t, thanks to the high court’s ruling. That’s a huge boon.
The surge has done likewise with the war. If it were going worse, McCain’s Churchillian rhetoric would match reality better. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, al Qaeda in Iraq almost totally routed and even Sadrist militias seemingly neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to feel comfortable voting for Obama. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s support for an American troop drawdown pushes the perceived stakes even lower.
Recall that Bill Clinton, with his dovish record and roster of “character issues,” would never have been elected if the Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed in 1991. With the Cold War over, the successful Reagan surge (and Bush pere’s cleanup efforts) made rolling the dice on Clinton tolerable. The McCain surge (and Bush fils’ success at averting another 9/11) produces the same effect for Obama.
A silver lining for McCain is that Obama’s arrogance and sense of indebtedness to his party’s antiwar base have elicited a series of credibility-damaging zigzags on Iraq. Obama would do better to promise peace with honor as soon as possible, then quickly move on to economy talk. The subsequent bleating from the bug-out lefties would be useful testament to Obama’s rumored centrism.
Although the economy will dominate this election, McCain can still press his advantage on foreign policy. But not with I-told-you-sos. Re-arguing the surge is almost as counterproductive as re-arguing the war itself. Elections are about the future.
McCain doesn’t need to explain why he’d be a better commander-in-chief. Voters already acknowledge his superior judgment on foreign policy by huge margins. He needs to explain why, going forward, we’ll need that judgment.
By Jonah Goldberg
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online.
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Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
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See all 43 CommentsThey significantly underestimated the number of troops needed.
I wouldn''t brag too long and hard about finally admitting such a mistake - AFTER so many American soldiers had died because of it.
All McCain can really claim is that he may have come to that sad conclusion a bit earlier than Bush and Rummy did - big deal.
It was still a HUGE mistake to begin with, and a mistake that McCain originally supported too - and that''s what we''ll all remember.
As sad as it is makes me to acknowledge this, you''re absolutely right. How on earth do we as a Society ever get our "country" back? Democracy...what a joke. What we have here is a Dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. Do you want to know the truth? Our system is as rigged as the former SOVIET system was. With one big difference...The Soviet system to masquerade itself as a democracy, which I guess in many respects, was far less hypocritical than what we have in America. Democracy hasn''t been alive other than the words on a piece of paper since this country was born. Facts are facts! America, home of HYPOCRISY masquerading as DEMOCRACY!
We now have the chance to make positive change (which the right wing wackos are so scared of). So why bring up the conservative Clinton, who bowed down to the fascist corporations (unfortunately they run the elections, the press and the government, for all intents and purposes.
Obama is wise enough to maintain our security without starting wars of conquest. He will raise taxes on the rich as has always been done in wartime. That is so much better than the borrow and spend GOP who is propping our economy up with smoke and mirrors. He will bring common sense to our foreign and domestic policies because he is a thinker. So unlike McBush and McSame, both quite literally enemies of the people of our country.
My experience is that when you fall in love with a product before you buy it you often don''t bother to examine it closely enough. When you get it home you find out it doesn''t do what you thought it does and doesn''t work they way you thought it should.
Your in love with Obama and you have no idea what your getting. IF I were you I would start demanding something more than statements about "its time for change" and "Yes we can" and start asking him HOW he will implement change. YOu might find out he plans on taxing the *** out of you to send to foriegn nations. You might find he will double the military budget or impose massive taxes on gasoline to reduce emmisions and they by cripple the nation.
Ask him questions he has to be specific on. I don''t know what he will do - and you don''t either.
Frankly - he took the Bill Clinton play book and has basically run that game plan. What that implies is that- like Bill he will respond not to his consence or thought but to the latest polls.
Remember - Bill Clinton passed NAFTA and Wellfare reform - making him the most successful conservative president since Regean.
People like OneAmerican, who dare to compare the illegal Iraq occupation for oil to WWII are both clueless and jaded by the right wing government propaganda. Keep advertising your ignorance, it is good for us all to see what we face.
To borrow from Hillary Clinton, for Obama to hold to this argument, he would have to have a willful suspension of his belief.
But then, liberals never let the facts get in the way of far-left political dogma.
It''s amazing that so-called liberals (supposedly people who are tolerant of others) pick on physical characteristics of people. I remember shortly after Ms Rice was appointed Secretary of State, she was attacked on the gap between her teeth. In Australia, a former Prime Minister was most often attacked over his height. This type of attack is childish.
Posted by Mycomment at 07:47 AM : Jul 24, 2008
A solution to an illegal invasion - Wie Dumm...
----- Posted by grigjd3
I agree with this comment wholeheartedly. Nice surprise to see a balanced article come out of NRO.
UTICA, New York - Four states have changed color on the Zogby Electoral College map at www.zogby.com, as presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama battle for the upper hand. Obama maintains his substantial lead over McCain in the Electoral College race, the latest map shows, as he remains at 273 votes, but McCain loses 14 votes.
The latest calculations represented by the map are the result of analysis by Pollster John Zogby, based on Zogby and industry polling, as well as other factors.
Pollster John Zogby: "For the time being, Obama maintains the edge and has the strength of a majority of electoral votes. His triumphant foreign trip allows him to continue to define this race. But too many of these states are close and a sizable number are undecided or choosing a third party candidate. So there is a lot of fluidity."
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