The more the presidential campaign unfolds, the more it resembles a Twilight Zone episode in which reality has no meaning at all.
For over a year, Barack Obama’s position on Iraq has been entirely consistent — a flexible withdrawal timeline, over 16 months, with one to two brigades a month. He would consult with commanders on the ground about how best to execute this policy, and would consider conditions on the ground, but Obama is committed to a withdrawal policy. He’s said this over and over again.
In fact, conditions-based flexibility has always been a hallmark of Obama’s policy. Asked earlier this year if he’d refine the timeline based on events on the ground, Obama said he would. Asked if he’d guarantee that all the troops would be out of Iraq, no matter, what 2013, Obama demurred.
So, yesterday, when Obama repeated the exact same policy he’s emphasized for over a year, the McCain campaign and the national political media — the distinctions between McCain and his “base” continue to blur — pounced. Obama, they said without evidence or connection to reality, had changed his policy.
The problem, of course, is that McCain and the traditional media outlets had already picked the narrative in advance. Republicans decided recently that Obama would change his Iraq policy. Why? Because they said so, and proceeded to repeat the claim, incessantly, over the last 10 days. Major news outlets, demonstrating 2000-like levels of professional malpractice, bought into it. Why? Because Republicans told them to like the “move to the center” narrative, and the media is anxious to acquiesce.
As such, when Obama explained yesterday morning that he’d continue to take reality into account when shaping the details of his withdrawal policy, the Republican National Committee issued a statement that said, “There appears to be no issue that Barack Obama is not willing to reverse himself on for the sake of political expedience.” The RNC assumed — or at least, hoped — that professional journalists at major media outlets are blisteringly stupid.
At which point, the professional journalists at major media outlets sought to prove the RNC right. They started the week royally screwing up the Wesley Clark story, and they ended the week royally screwing up Obama’s Iraq policy story.
The AP, which has basically been running McCain campaign press releases as news articles, said Obama had “opened the door … to altering his plan to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq in 16 months.” That hadn’t, you know, actually happened, but the RNC said it had, and that was good enough for the Associated Press. Other news outlets followed suit, as did the cable news networks.
Almost immediately, it became accepted fact — Obama had reversed course. “Everyone” knew it was going to happen, and then “everyone” knew that it had happened. That Obama’s policy hadn’t changed at all was irrelevant, and frankly, inconvenient. McCain and the media had what they wanted, and they were running with it.
So, Obama, visibly frustrated, held another press conference to say, again, that his policy has not changed.
Remind me again why any mentally healthy individual would argue that the national media is going easy on Obama?
The hang-up seems to be over Obama’s use of the word “refine.” Obama is willing, in other words, to improve the details on how he’d withdraw from Iraq. What’s less clear is why anyone over the age of seven would find this controversial. As Matt Yglesias put it, “Basically, unless Obama comes out and says something like ‘I’m a totally unreasonable person whose views on Iraq will in no way be influenced by anyone’s advice or any possible factual developments’ he’s now a flip-flopper. Meanwhile, John McCain’s views on Iraq receive no scrutiny whatsoever.”
In a sign of the Rovian tactics to come, the McCain campaign’s press statement insulted the intelligence of everyone who saw it.
“Today, Barack Obama reversed that position proving once again that his words do not matter. He has now adopted John McCain’s position that we cannot risk the progress we have made in Iraq by beginning to withdraw our troops immediately without concern for conditions on the ground. There is nothing wrong with changing your mind when the facts on the ground dictate it. Indeed, the facts have changed because of the success of the surge that John McCain advocated for years and Barack Obama opposed in a position that put politics ahead of country.
“Now that Barack Obama has changed course and proven his past positions to be just empty words, we would like to congratulate him for accepting John McCain’s principled stand on this critical national security issue. If he had visited Iraq sooner or actually had a one-on-one meeting with General Petraeus, he would have changed his position long ago.”
I like to think that public service through politics is an honorable pursuit. The McCain campaign is surprisingly anxious to remove any shred of honor from this process. This statement is a lie, the campaign knows it’s a lie, the reporters have to know it’s a lie, and anyone who speaks English can see that it’s a lie. But they said it anyway.
And Josh Marshall explained why the McCain campaign would bother to issue such a breathtakingly dishonest statement.
For the McCain campaign to put out a memo to reporters claiming that Obama has adopted McCain’s policy only shows that his advisors believe that a sizable percentage of the political press is made up of incorrigible morons. And it’s hard to disagree with the judgment.
The simple truth is that this campaign offers a very clear cut choice on Iraq. One candidate believes that the US occupation of Iraq is the solution; the other thinks it’s the problem. John McCain supports the permanent deployment of US troops in Iraq. That is why his hundred years remark isn’t some gotcha line. It’s a clear statement of his policy. Obama supports a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It’s a completely different view of America’s role in the world and future in the Middle East. Reporters who can’t grasp what Obama is saying seem simply to have been permanently befuddled by George W. Bush’s game-playing over delegating policy to commanders.
Yesterday was a farce. The journalists at the major news outlets ought to be ashamed of themselves. They are, quite literally, hurting the country. I expect the McCain campaign and the RNC to lie — it is, regrettably, what they do best — but there’s simply no excuse for the kind of reporting we’ve seen over the last 24 hours. It doesn’t even take any sophistication — just look at what Obama has said before, consider what he said yesterday, and notice that nothing has changed. Hell, use Google; it’s free.
It’s almost as if we’re watching a game in which the refs have been paid off.