I haven’t seen any polls on this, but in general, I have to assume the two words that voters care about least are “committee hearing.” It’s not that they’re trivial — hearings can actually be extremely important — but for the typical American, committee hearings probably sound pretty boring.
But for whatever reason, the McCain campaign has decided that Barack Obama’s failure to hold a subcommittee hearing on Afghanistan over the last year and a half is a critically important development. McCain has harped on this point repeatedly; his surrogates have tried to emphasize the profundity of this oversight; and the McCain campaign even went after Obama on the hearing issue in its new TV ad.
As long as the McCain gang is going to the trouble of raising a fuss about committee hearings, we might as well go to the trouble of pointing out how foolish this is.
First, McCain’s argument, at first blush, makes some sense. If a lawmaker takes Afghanistan seriously, the lawmaker would find take hearings about Afghanistan seriously. The problem, though, is that by McCain’s own standard, he doesn’t appear to care about Afghanistan at all.
It turns out that presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, has attended even fewer Afghanistan related hearings than Obama’s one. Which is a nice way of saying, McCain, R-Ariz., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee, has attended zero of his committee’s six hearings on Afghanistan over the last two years.
Meanwhile Obama attended the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan in March, 2007, although he used the opportunity to ask Gen. James L. Jones, then the commander of NATO, about Pakistan.
Jones also came before the Senate Armed Services Committee that week. But McCain was a no-show.
Do I care if McCain showed up for Senate Armed Service Committee hearings on Afghanistan? Not especially. But if McCain really wants to make committee hearings an important campaign issue, then great, let’s make committee hearings an important campaign issue.
But what about Obama’s subcommittee in particular? Joe Biden explains why this criticism doesn’t make any sense, either.
Obama is chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs — a panel that has jurisdiction over NATO’s operations, including its efforts in Afghanistan. The McCain campaign, like Hillary Clinton’s, has noted Obama has yet to hold a hearing dealing with Afghanistan since he became chairman nearly two years ago. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, the ranking member on that committee and an ardent supporter of John McCain, wrote a formal letter earlier this week to Obama criticizing his failure to hold hearings — a move seemingly designed to undercut the Democratic presidential candidate’s foreign policy credentials before he embarks on a trip abroad.
But Biden, conveniently the Chairman of the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hit back at DeMint Thursday, writing in a letter to him that NATO’s mission in Afghanistan has been dealt with at the full committee level.
“Under my chairmanship the Foreign Relations Committee has addressed most Afghanistan issues at the Full Committee level,” Biden wrote. “I believe that this is the best way of ensuring the most comprehensive examination of the complex issues involved, and of ensuring the highest-level Administration participation.” […]
“Senator Obama has displayed great leadership on this issue: he called nearly a year ago for the deployment of at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan — it has since become the accepted position of a wide range of U.S. military officials, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Biden added.
Truth be told, by the time a campaign gets to “Let’s argue about subcommittee hearings!” on the list of talking points, you have to assume the campaign is struggling to come up with anything interesting to say at all.
But even if we accept the McCain campaign’s premise, McCain still doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t shown up for any of the hearings on Afghanistan, and the attacks on the NATO subcommittee can’t withstand even minimal scrutiny.
Isn’t this supposed to be the new-and-improved McCain team? With the new campaign manager and political operation? Are these supposed to be the sharp guys who’ll run the campaign like a finely-tuned machine?
It looks to me like these guys need help.