{"id":16373,"date":"2008-07-27T09:30:13","date_gmt":"2008-07-27T13:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/16339.html"},"modified":"2008-07-27T09:30:13","modified_gmt":"2008-07-27T13:30:13","slug":"obama-thankful-for-the-foreign-policy-endorsements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/obama-thankful-for-the-foreign-policy-endorsements\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama thankful for the foreign policy endorsements"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday afternoon, John McCain told a national television audience that he thought a 16-month withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops in Iraq, as embraced by Barack Obama and Nouri al-Maliki, sounds like “a pretty good timetable<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Yesterday, speaking to reporters in London, Obama mentioned how delighted he is<\/a> to see the Republican establishment come around to his way of thinking.<\/p>\n

“In terms of his comment about, that maybe 16 months sounds good — we are pleased to see that there has been some convergence around proposals that we’ve been making for a year and a half. The fact that John McCain now thinks that we should put more troops into Afghanistan I think is a good thing and that the Bush administration acknowledges that as well. I have been talking about that since last year. The fact that the Bush administration assigned Bill Burns — an outstanding diplomat — to get involved in the talks surrounding Iran, something I’ve been advocating for for over a year and a half, I think that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n

“The fact that John McCain now thinks that it’s possible for us to execute a phased withdrawal — I think that’s a positive thing and if the administration believes that as well, then I will, I will be fully supportive. You know, the point I’ve made throughout the course of this trip is that a lot of these foreign policy issues have been seen through a prism of politics and ideology for too long, and part of the reason I think you’re seeing some convergence is that reality is asserting itself and you can’t argue with facts, and I think the issues are so important, the stakes are so high that I welcome any movement that gets our foreign policy right for the future.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You’ll notice that Obama used the word “convergence” twice.<\/p>\n

It’s subtle, but Obama is making a very reasonable case, based on recent developments — we’re seeing a growing consensus about what kind of foreign policy vision works, and it’s the vision Obama has been emphasizing all along. The media spent a couple of weeks running around with their hair on fire, screaming that Obama was “shifting” on foreign policy, when in fact, reporters had been spun backwards — Obama stayed the same, and the establishment started coming to him.<\/p>\n

In this sense, Obama’s comments in London were, I hope, a campaign theme we’ll be hearing more of — for all the far-right talk about Obama’s inexperience on foreign affairs and national security, Republicans have decided that the rookie has been right from the start.<\/p>\n

And, of course, the inverse is also true.
\n
\nWhile Obama is noting that McCain and Bush are moving in his direction on foreign policy matters, Josh Marshall makes the case<\/a> that McCain’s message has been largely turned on its head. Indeed, McCain is running on a platform that was hard to predict as recently as a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n

Just think that a couple weeks ago the entire campaign was engulfed by scrutiny of Obama’s suggestion that he might be “refining” his plan for a 16 month timetable for withdrawal — a twitter, if that, on the seismograph of campaign course corrections. Now consider that over the span of a few weeks Sen. McCain has gone from predicting a decades long presence of American troops in Iraq and attacking any discussion of timetables for withdrawal to endorsing Maliki’s push for a 16 month timetable and tying himself in knots trying to explain why what Maliki’s endorsing is any different from Obama’s. <\/p>\n

When confronted with Maliki’s own words saying that he supports what Obama supports, McCain now falls back on that last redoubt of philanderers, asking the American people, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?”<\/p>\n

For all the seismic shifts that have taken place over the last two weeks, we need to recognize that McCain has now abandoned virtually everything he’s been campaigning on for the last year. There’s really no more eloquent confirmation of that reality than the fact that McCain now appears determined to base his campaign on charges that Obama is unpatriotic and despises American soldiers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you think about it, there’s just nothing left. McCain can’t run on the economy — he doesn’t know anything about it, and he embraces the identical policies of George W. Bush, who got us in this mess in the first place. He can’t run on his vision for the future; he doesn’t have one. He can’t run on his Senate record, because he’s flip-flopped on practically every issue imaginable<\/a>. And now, McCain can’t even run on foreign policy, because he’s suddenly discovered how much he likes Obama’s Afghanistan policy and the Obama\/Maliki withdrawal timetable.<\/p>\n

So, what’s left? Obama is a treasonous socialist who hates the military. It’s genuinely pathetic, but McCain doesn’t see any alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday afternoon, John McCain told a national television audience that he thought a 16-month withdrawal timetable for U.S. troops in Iraq, as embraced by Barack Obama and Nouri al-Maliki, sounds like “a pretty good timetable.” Yesterday, speaking to reporters in London, Obama mentioned how delighted he is to see the Republican establishment come around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}