The McCain campaign does not wear desperation well. It floats from incoherent attack to incoherent attack, experimenting with anti-Obama memes, and fiddling with smears, waiting for something to stick.
Two weeks ago, McCain and his cohorts said Barack Obama was too flexible on Iraq policy. Soon after, they insisted Obama wasn’t flexible enough on Iraq policy. As of today, McCain & Co. believe Obama doesn’t genuinely care about Iraq policy, because if he did, he’d agree with John McCain.
As Barack Obama reaffirmed this week, at the core of his strategy is a politically motivated promise to withdraw — regardless of the facts on the ground or advice of our military commanders. […]
As we see progress in Iraq because of the Surge strategy that John McCain advocated, many questioned whether Barack Obama would maintain his steadfast refusal to recognize the facts on the ground and continue his stubborn call for immediate withdrawal. Barack Obama has now answered those questions by tossing aside the facts in favor of an ideologically-driven approach that puts unconditional withdrawal above all other considerations. He has done this without even bothering to see the facts on the ground. […]
Barack Obama has determined that he would rather lose a war that we are winning than lose an election by alienating his base. This is the reason Obama did not have to wait until his trip to declare his strategy. Iraq is fundamentally a political decision for Barack Obama, not a national security decision.
Just to add a touch of irony, this borderline-mentally-ill analysis comes from McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who compared Obama to Donald Rumsfeld today, despite the fact that Scheunemann was one of the Rumsfeld consultants responsible for the fiasco in the first place.
Scheunemann is a classless hack, with no apparent sense of decency or shame, so it’s probably best not to take his wild-eyed tirades too seriously. But to accuse Obama of deliberately wanting to lose a war is to effectively accuse Obama of treason.
For months, the McCain campaign has been itching to go after Obama’s patriotism. Apparently, they just figured out how they’d like to proceed.
It’s hard to know whether Scheunemann is, or is merely pretending to be, dimwitted, but this isn’t an especially complicated policy dispute. John McCain wants to stay the course; Barack Obama wants to change course. McCain believes keeping U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely is the answer to our problem; Obama believes keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is the problem. McCain, as president, would set a policy of staying in Iraq until we achieve some elusive, hard-to-define “victory,” which McCain can’t quite explain, but he’ll know it when he sees it. Obama, as president, would set a different policy — careful, deliberate withdrawal, with flexibility based on facts on the ground and the advice of our military commanders.
To hear the McCain campaign tell it, Obama doesn’t really believe his own policy, he’s just saying it to win an election. The McCain gang is basing this on … nothing in particular. Presumably, only those who support an indefinite war, followed by an indefinite “presence,” care about national security.
Two weeks ago, Republicans literally argued that Obama “has now adopted John McCain’s position” on troop withdrawal. Today, Republicans believe Obama favors “an ideologically-driven approach that puts unconditional withdrawal above all other considerations.” Obama’s position hasn’t changed; right-wing smears have.
My friend Alex Koppelman took Scheunemann’s attack apart quite effectively.
There are a couple of interesting — and faulty — things about this line of attack. First, Obama may not have visited Afghanistan, but he somehow managed to come up with a policy for American strategy in that country that McCain is now emulating.
Also, though it makes for a neat sound bite, and perhaps an effective one, it’s hardly clear that visiting Iraq as a presidential candidate will actually give Obama a realistic picture of the situation there. As CNN’s Michael Ware, a longtime Iraq reporter, quipped earlier this year, when McCain and his surrogates were pressuring Obama to travel to Iraq, “I mean Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times. And we’ve seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong.”
Really, one need look no further than McCain’s own visits to Iraq to see just how skewed a picture such a trip can present, especially if someone wants to create a modern-day Potemkin village. Remember his visit to a seemingly peaceful market in Baghdad? That was only possible because of “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead,” and the next day, merchants there exposed the fiction behind his stroll.
I don’t know what’s gotten into Republicans lately. Is there something in the water?
Update: The Obama campaign has responded to the McCain campaign’s hatchet job with an effective memo/statement: “All John McCain has ever looked for in Iraq are reasons to stay there indefinitely. He has stubbornly championed a strategy of fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq regardless of the shifting facts offered to justify it, regardless of the levels of violence and political progress in the country, and regardless of the gathering strength of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And now, as he advocates a policy of staying in Iraq indefinitely, it is clear that he is going to continue to adhere to George Bush’s ideological agenda even as every other critical national security challenge is neglected, and our troops continue to fight tour after tour of duty and our taxpayers spend $10 billion a month in Iraq.”