Way back in February 2006, Barack Obama and John McCain got into quite a dust-up over a lobbying reform measure. McCain wanted a task force, Obama preferred using standing committees, and McCain lost his cool. Long story.
Yesterday, their rivalry seemed to grow considerably more intense. Here’s the timeline:
* McCain accused Obama (and Hillary Clinton) of waving “a white flag to al Qaeda.”
* Obama responded in a speech, saying that McCain clearly believes “the course we are on in Iraq is working, but I do not. And if there ever was a reflection of that it’s the fact that Senator McCain required a flack jacket, ten armored Humvees, two Apache attack helicopters, and 100 soldiers with rifles by his side to stroll through a market in Baghdad just a few weeks ago.”
* McCain responded to Obama’s response with yet another statement: “While Senator Obama’s two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military leaders on the ground in Iraq lead me to believe that we must give this new strategy a chance to succeed because the consequences of failure would be catastrophic to our nation’s security. By the way, Senator Obama, it’s a ‘flak’ jacket, not a ‘flack’ jacket.”
* And just because the McCain campaign lacks a modicum of class, an anonymous McCain staffer told The Politico, “Obama wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong.” (Note to Politico: why grant anonymity for a shot like this?)
Now, it’s possible that this became fascinating to the political world because it was a slow news day, but I think we know better. We’re talking about two of the most powerful and most notable personalities in American politics, both of whom are top-tier candidates for the presidency, and both of whom seemed to revel in trading shots yesterday.
One thing I noticed yesterday, watching Obama deliver his response to McCain’s initial shot, was that he seemed to enjoy mixing it up a little bit. Obama is running a campaign in which he frequently talks about changing the way politics is done. His stump speech emphasizes above-the-fray concepts and bipartisanship. It’s led plenty of Democrats to wonder if Obama is aggressive enough to swing a few elbows when he has to.
Indeed, the conventional wisdom suggests one of the central questions about Obama is whether he can take a punch. My question has always been the opposite: can he deliver a punch?
That was what made yesterday’s back-and-forth interesting to me. Obama almost smiled calling McCain out, by name. It was one of the first, if not the very first, direct shots he took at the Republicans’ top tier. It was almost as if Obama was delivering an underlying message to Dems: “Don’t worry, I’m not nice all the time.”
As for McCain’s final shot, it’s pretty silly to criticize Obama for his campaign’s typo, but there’s a more important angle: McCain’s wrong. Media Matters found several examples of major media outlets — and the Pentagon — referring to “flack” jackets.
So, ultimately, McCain and his campaign team a) defended a failed policy in Iraq; b) corrected the spelling of a word that wasn’t misspelled; and c) took the inevitable cheap shot.
Livening up Memorial Day weekend for political reporters everywhere….