The traditional dynamic for recent presidential races considers what the Democratic candidate will do when the Republican candidate goes on the offensive. I get the distinct impression that the Obama campaign wants to flip that equation and keep McCain on the defensive as much as possible.
On Thursday, the presumptive GOP nominee walked himself into an unforced error, telling a Wisconsin audience that U.S. forces in Iraq have been “drawn down to pre-surge levels.” This, of course, isn’t even remotely true. When pressed on the error, McCain’s campaign said it was a matter of “the tense of the verb,” because the senator’s comment will be true in a couple of months. This is both factually wrong and surprisingly foolish. Pressed to admit he misspoke, McCain refused.
Obama wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass him by.
“[I]t seems like Senator McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts,” Obama told a Montana audience last night, “because yesterday — in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy — he stood up in Wisconsin and said, ‘We have drawn down to pre-surge levels’ in Iraq. That’s not true, and anyone running for Commander-in-Chief should know better.
“As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq — 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer — that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Senator McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to ‘nitpicking.’
“Well I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.”
I think this is generally known as “going on the offensive.”
As it turns out, the more the McCain campaign pushed back yesterday, the worse it got for them. The WaPo’s Michael Dobbs noted yesterday afternoon, “Prior to the conference call, I was inclined to give McCain a maximum of two Pinocchios for his misstatement about troop levels in Iraq. Everybody misspeaks once in a while. But the attempt by the McCain media machine to spin the mistake as a simple matter of ‘verb tenses’ is an insult to our intelligence.”
They would have been so much better off admitting that McCain misspoke, apologizing, and moving on. But, no. They fell in a ditch and kept on digging, not unlike McCain’s approach to the war itself.
I noticed that Joe Klein and Michael Crowley think McCain’s mistake is largely inconsequential and “not very revealing of anything.” I disagree. The entire basis for McCain’s presidential campaign is his expertise on military matters, his support for Bush’s Iraq policy, and his unwavering commitment to the “surge.” And yet, based on his own remarks, McCain doesn’t seem to have any idea how many U.S. troops we have in Iraq.
This is his signature issue. If McCain doesn’t know what he’s talking about on this subject, he doesn’t have anything in reserve. It’s not “nitpicking” to note that McCain seems incapable of speaking intelligently on the issue he cares about most.
What’s more, it’d be easier to overlook isolated mistakes if McCain didn’t screw up the basics of what’s going on in Iraq so frequently. McCain has been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq; confused about the source of violence in Iraq; confused about Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda; confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia; confused about Gen. Petraeus’ responsibilities in Iraq; and confused about what transpired during the Maliki government’s offensive in Basra.
Worse, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in November 2006, McCain couldn’t answer a reporter’s question about his own opinions on the war without reading prepared notes on national television. As recently as March 2007, McCain was embarrassing himself by insisting that Gen. Petraeus travels around Baghdad “in a non-armed Humvee” (a comment that military leaders literally laughed at.)
I think any intellectually honest person would agree that if all of this happened to Barack Obama, he’d be laughed off the presidential stage, and the media would relentlessly insist that he was clueless and unqualified to be commander in chief during a war. And yet, it’s not Obama, it’s the Republican who claims Iraq as his strongest issue.
The point is, with each passing week, it appears John McCain simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.