Intense Scrutiny On Candidate Words
Following Tuesday night's "CBS Evening News" exclusive and separate interviews with Sens. Obama and McCain, responses to questions on foreign affairs that each candidate gave to Katie Couric are being parsed on both sides of the political spectrum.
(Click here for the full transcript of the Obama interview and here for the full McCain interview)
On Wednesday morning, the Republican National Committee sent around this video clip, which shows Obama at a primary debate in February explaining that a Senate committee he chaired had not held oversight hearings on Afghanistan because he had been devoting the bulk of his time to campaigning. The clip then cuts to a segment of last night's CBS News interview, in which Obama seemed to change his explanation for why he hadn't held hearings on Afghanistan.
"Actually the subcommittee that I chair is the European subcommittee, and any issues related to Afghanistan were always dealt with in the full committee, precisely because it's so important," Obama told Couric. "That's not a matter that you would deal with in a subcommittee setting."
Meanwhile, left-leaning blogs zeroed in on McCain's assertion that the troop surge in Iraq was a direct instigator to the so-called "Anbar awakening," in which Sunni tribes in Anbar Province united against al Qaeda in Iraq.
In The Huffington Post, Seth Colter Walls writes, "The record firmly establishes the opposite: instead of being caused by the surge, the key signs of the Anbar Awakening occurred not only before that strategy was implemented, but before it was ever conceived."
On a conference call on Wednesday, McCain senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann defended McCain's assessment of the troop surge.
"Had there been no surge, the awakening would have been defeated," Scheunemann said.
But as CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder notes, McCain might be given the benefit of the doubt by arguing that the surge helped the Anbar awakening to succeed, "but if the Awakening is a chicken and the surge is an egg, the chicken came before the egg."