The McCain campaign doesn’t seem especially concerned about Democratic attacks that he’s running to give the nation a third Bush term. He doesn’t seem to care when people highlight his age. He shrugs off questions about his reputation as a hothead with a nasty temperament who flies off the handle on a regular basis. He couldn’t care less when he’s caught flip-flopping, abandoning long-held principles, or getting confused about the basics of public policy.
But bring up his line about leaving troops in Iraq for 100 years, and McCain goes completely apoplectic. It seems to be the one point of criticism that McCain and his campaign fear most.
Fortunately, thanks to the Republicans’ coordinated freak-out, the Democratic National Committee knew precisely where to poke McCain.
As Nico Pitney noted, the McCain campaign has “sent out no less than 13 emails decrying the use of the “100 years” line by his political opponents.” But there’s nothing in the DNC ad that’s false — while some, at times, have falsely suggested that McCain has vowed to keep the war going for 100 years, this commercial just uses the senator’s own words.
In a press release unveiling the ad, DNC Chairman Howard Dean carefully worded his attack to make sure it’s absolutely factual: “What John McCain doesn’t understand is that the American people aren’t fine with being in Iraq for 100 years in any capacity. The American people want a President who will responsibly end the war, not more of the same failed policy in Iraq that continues to cost $12 billion a month. They want a President who will invest that money here at home to create jobs and ensure our kids have health care. The more voters learn about John McCain, we’re confident they will recognize that he is the wrong choice for America’s future.”
Sounds good to me.
There’s no great mystery here. First, McCain’s comment was politically tone-deaf (every time he said it). As Josh Marshall explained a couple of weeks ago, “No one wants to be in Iraq 100 years from now, even if McCain stipulates to the fantasy that Iraqis will be happy having us occupy their country forever and that the place will become like Finland. And none of our soldiers will ever get killed there and it won’t cost any money. If that’s the explanation for why we shouldn’t be concerned that he’s happy to stay in Iraq for a century, that just tells people that McCain is living in a fantasy world.”
Second, it’s an awful policy prescription. As Joe Klein recently noted, “The problem with John McCain’s 100 years in Iraq formulation isn’t that he’s calling for 95 more years of combat — he isn’t — but that he thinks you can have a long-term basing arrangement in Iraq similar to those we have in Germany or Korea. That betrays a fairly acute lack of knowledge about both Iraq and Islam. It may well be possible to station U.S. troops in small, peripheral kingdoms like Dubai or Kuwait, but Iraq is — and has always been — volatile, tenuous, centrally-located and nearly as sensitive to the presence of infidels as Saudi Arabia. It is a terrible candidate for a long-term basing agreement.
And third, McCain has flip-flopped more than once on whether he actually thinks his own idea is any good.
There’s simply no reason for Democrats to feel even the slightest bit hesitant about using this. Even in its full context, McCain has said, on multiple occasions, that he’s comfortable leaving U.S. troops in Iraq for a century or more. The only way that’s even possible is to establish permanent bases, which are opposed by both Iraqis and Americans, and which fuel anti-American violence. He said it, he meant it, and Democrats would be insane not to tell voters about it.
And yet, McCain and Republicans have, for several weeks, launched a coordinated, carefully-orchestrated campaign to get people — everyone, really — to stop using the words “McCain,” “Iraq,” and “100 years” in the same sentence. No one can do push-back as well as the Republican Machine, and these guys are intent on making it impossible to hit McCain where it hurts.
As such, I’m delighted the DNC is ignoring the push-back and poking the sore spot.