marbury

mccain should chill

The WSJ have an excellent profile of newly promoted McCain campaign chief Steve Schmidt. Let me pick on one bit of it:

Mr. Schmidt specializes in the combat that dominates today's political culture -- the minute-by-minute, talking point-vs.-talking point battles that fill a 24-hour news cycle.

That may be the case, but I fear Schmidt and co. are so caught up in the daily message battle that they don't have a clear sense of perspective on what they should and shouldn't be saying. This kind of nonsense, for instance, just makes them come off as bitter and petty. As Daniel Finkelstein has argued, the McCain campaign needs to avoid sounding sour about Obama. They should practice brutal magnaminity: portray their opponent as a well-meaning guy who just isn't experienced enough to do the job (listen to Mitt!). Schmidt sounds like one half of the team McCain needs.

like rain on your wedding day

Thomas Friedman on the irony that the success of the surge is helping Obama, not McCain:

McCain was right about the surge. It has helped to stabilize Iraq and create a better chance there for political reconciliation. But Iraq has always been a story full of surprises. And one of the most important political surprises is how quickly the surge has made Iraq safe for Barack Obama’s foreign policy...

So McCain, who called the surge right, may get little credit, because the story now is about post-surge Iraq. McCain’s post-surge view — which also may be right — is that Iraqis still do not have the military force capable of protecting their homeland and need more U.S. help in nation-building. Meanwhile, Obama, who was not a surge supporter and simply stuck to his 16-month withdrawal timetable, finds himself — by luck or smarts — in perfect harmony with the post-surge mood in Iraq.

How enraging for McCain. On the biggest foreign policy issue of the day, here's a stonking big judgement call that he got right and his opponent got wrong. His call was made despite political opinion being against him; Obama's was made in large part to pander to his own party. There shouldn't be any more argument about who's best qualified to run the country, or about who is the stronger character. And yet somehow the kid is getting away with it!

It will be enormously difficult, emotionally, for McCain to drag himself away from this subject. But somehow - for the reasons Friedman outlines - he must let it go. The debate has moved on.

punching thin air

Here's an extract from Obama's interview with CBS's Katie Couric (who surely should have changed her name to Katherine when she made the switch from morning to evening anchor, no?), to be broadcast tonight.

Couric: But talking microcosmically, did the surge, the addition of 30,000 additional troops ... help the situation in Iraq?

Obama: Katie, as … you've asked me three different times, and I have said repeatedly that there is no doubt that our troops helped to reduce violence. There's no doubt.

Couric: But yet you're saying … given what you know now, you still wouldn't support it … so I'm just trying to understand this.

Obama: Because … it's pretty straightforward. By us putting $10 billion to $12 billion a month, $200 billion, that's money that could have gone into Afghanistan. Those additional troops could have gone into Afghanistan. That money also could have been used to shore up a declining economic situation in the United States. That money could have been applied to having a serious energy security plan so that we were reducing our demand on oil, which is helping to fund the insurgents in many countries.

This is just the bit in the middle. Couric, much to her credit, tries her damndest to pin Obama down on the question of whether he thinks the surge worked. But it's like trying to land a punch on Ali in his dancing prime. Obama (sort of) agrees that the surge reduced violence. So, knowing this, would he support it now? A feint, a shimmy, and before you know it he's talking about America's energy policy.

Of course, the only reason he can't just say that the surge worked and that with hindsight, it was a good idea, is that its co-architects were George Bush and John McCain. He would rather risk the appearance of evasiveness than admit that he was wrong and his opponent was right. Which, when you put it like that, is understandable, if not terribly manly.

McCain thinks he has Obama in a headlock here, and he's squeezing hard. But Obama (thin neck, small head) is adept at slipping out of wrestling holds. I think he'll escape this one without injury, because it's an argument about a tactical issue that's already happened, rather than one about the bigger questions of why the war was fought and what to do about it now.

Obama's bold, headlock-slipping move is to pretty much declare the war in Iraq over; he focuses on  finding a political solution there whilst discussing the military situation in Afghanistan.

McCain's tragedy is this: the better his surge works (ie, the more stable Iraq becomes) the less important Iraq becomes as an issue in the campaign - and the more difficult it is for him to fight the contest on the ground he feels most comfortable on.

dept. of obvious metaphors

Seems like nobody wants to have their photo taken with Bush any more. Perhaps this little girl has plans to run for office; she certainly displays an acute sense of political judgement:

a little bit of a stretch, maybe?

McCain's latest ad blames Obama for the high price of gas. No, really.

Despite the recent shake-up in McCain's team I'm still getting the impression that it's a Keystone Cop operation.

UPDATE: more evidence for that here.

grumpy old men

And another thing. What is it with these kids and their mobile phones? I have to say, at the risk of sounding snide, that pictures like this are the worst kind of contrast with Obama's youthful dynamism. McCain should be spending time with Bobby Jindal this week, not George Bush Snr.

nose, face

This seems crazy to me. Apparently, some female Clinton supporters have got themselves into a position where they're against Obama choosing a woman for VP, if it's not Clinton:

If he does not choose Mrs. Clinton, several Democrats said, it would be difficult for him to name any woman — like Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, someone for whom he has had warm words. Both Clinton and Obama advisers said such a move could create a backlash among women who supported Mrs. Clinton.

not much lost in translation, then

Here are Maliki's words, authoritatively translated by the NYT:

"Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq."

he'll be texting next

This NYT report on John McCain's record in the Senate since his 2000 presidential run reminds us of how, for all Obama's talk of reaching across divides, it's McCain who actually has the record of bipartisan achievement. As an aside, though, this caught my eye:

“I returned to the Senate with greater influence than before I ran, and I used that influence to work with senators on both sides of the aisle,” Mr. McCain said in an e-mail message. “I don’t believe in hoarding political capital just for the sake of possessing it.”

So, did he write the email himself? I wonder...

those pesky iraqis

John McCain has Obama in a box? Looks like the box just collapsed in on McCain.

On Friday Prime Minister al-Maliki (or 'Cheeky Maliki' as he isn't known at the White House) let it be known he'd prefer American troops to be out of Iraq within sixteen months - the same timetable as Obama has set. After a phone call from the White House - during which, I'm sure, satellites melted -  Maliki walked it back, claiming he'd been mistranslated (because, of course, the word for 'indefinitely' in Arabic is sometimes used to mean 'within sixteen months').

Maliki knew exactly what he was doing; he was making a deliberate - and from the McCain and Bush points of view, very unwelcome - intervention in the American election campaign. The more say he has in when the troops go home, the better for him. His newfound boldness is very bad news for McCain. He can't say, on the one hand, that American troops should stay for longer than two years in large numbers and indefinitely in smaller numbers and, on the other hand, that they should stay until the Iraqis want them to go. If Maliki sticks to this position or something like it, then McCain can't really disagree with him without finding a more imperialistic rationale for the occupation. But American voters aren't up for imperialism, never have been. If the Iraqis want them out, they'll be more than happy to get out.

All of which means Iraq - which McCain had hoped to turn into the central issue of the campaign - may well recede as an issue. Which means the economy will dominate the debate more than ever. Not McCain's strong suit. No wonder one of his occasional advisers, responding to Friday's reports, resorted to undiplomatic language to express his reaction: "We're fucked."