{"id":9502,"date":"2007-01-03T09:45:23","date_gmt":"2007-01-03T14:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9502.html"},"modified":"2007-01-03T09:45:23","modified_gmt":"2007-01-03T14:45:23","slug":"edwards-defines-the-mccain-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/edwards-defines-the-mccain-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"Edwards defines the ‘McCain doctrine’"},"content":{"rendered":"

I neglected to mention this yesterday, but it’s still worth noting that [tag]John Edwards[\/tag] has crafted exactly the right frame of the president’s escalation plan for Iraq. It’s time to start calling it the “McCain doctrine<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, targeting a potential Republican rival in 2008, dubbed plans for a short-term U.S. troop increase in Iraq “the [tag]McCain doctrine[\/tag],” in an interview aired on Sunday.<\/p>\n

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, considered likely to be a Republican candidate for president, has been “the most prominent spokesperson for this for some time,” Edwards said in an early salvo of the 2008 campaign.<\/p>\n

Edwards, a former senator who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, made his remarks in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week.”<\/p>\n

“I actually, myself, believe that this idea of surging troops, escalating the war — what Senator McCain has been talking about — what I would call now the McCain doctrine … (is) dead wrong,” said Edwards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Quite right. The war in Iraq has already ruined Bush’s presidency; there’s no need to pile on by tying escalation to the White House. It’s John McCain who’s been pushing for this escalation for years, and it’s his pressure on Bush that appears to be having an effect.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, Edwards is obviously right to tie McCain to his own idea. In late November, McCain insisted<\/a> that “we will not win this war” without additional combat forces in Iraq. Maybe he meant it, maybe it was a calculated strategy whereby McCain could separate himself from Bush’s failed policy by calling for additional troops he didn’t expect the president to send. (Robert Reich suggested<\/a> it’s a way for McCain to “effectively cover his ass. It will allow him to say, ‘If the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened.'”)<\/p>\n

But now that it appears that it will happen, it’s time to put the “McCain doctrine” to public scrutiny. It’s obvious but brilliant: if the public rejects the idea of an escalation (and they do<\/a>), it’s best to remind them of the idea’s biggest champion, who just so happens to be the leading 2008 presidential candidate.<\/p>\n

We can only hope other Dems pick up on Edwards’ very clever frame.
\n
\nOn a related note, the Keith Olbermann commentary<\/a>, mentioned<\/a> earlier, included some particularly poignant remarks about the senator from Arizona.<\/p>\n

John McCain may still hear the applause of small crowds — he has somehow inured himself to the hypocrisy, and the tragedy, of a man who considers himself the ultimate realist, courting the votes of those who support the government telling visitors to the Grand Canyon that it was caused by the Great Flood.<\/p>\n

That Mr. McCain is selling himself off to the irrational right, parcel by parcel, like some great landowner facing bankruptcy, seems to be obvious to everybody but himself.<\/p>\n

Or, maybe it is obvious to him and he simply no longer cares.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The war has forever bankrupted one presidency, and if there’s any justice, it may do the same to one leading presidential campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I neglected to mention this yesterday, but it’s still worth noting that [tag]John Edwards[\/tag] has crafted exactly the right frame of the president’s escalation plan for Iraq. It’s time to start calling it the “McCain doctrine.” Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, targeting a potential Republican rival in 2008, dubbed plans for a short-term U.S. troop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502","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=9502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}