The McCain scrutiny XII

Friday’s Huffington Post featured an image of Sen. John McCain that, as pictures often do, told a story of at least a thousand words. The image showed McCain at some 2008 campaign event, holding in his left hand a cell phone —not one created in recent years, but a piece worthy of space at the Smithsonian, one of the early models the size of a brick.


The blogosphere, as you might imagine, has been, well, the blogosphere. Especially at HuffPost:

ChristiB (paraphrasing McCain): “I wonder if I can get on the google with this contraption …”

LAJimm: Come on guys, give him a break. He’s trying to build a bridge to the 19th century.

6WaysToSunday: Looks like the same phone from Dukakis' tank.

VolvoBirkenstock: He's talking to tech support on the Iraq/Pakistan border.

Kahni: That's the phone he uses to contact Czechoslovakia.

We’ve referred to this thing as an “image” — it’s impossible to tell by looking if this is an actual photograph or something cleverly doctored by Photoshop. If it’s really a “photo-illustration,” it’s a very good one. But whether it is or not almost doesn’t matter.

In more substantive ways, particularly on matters on foreign policy and the war in Iraq — matters in which McCain and the Bush administration are in lockstep — the picture perfectly illustrates McCain’s current standing as a man compromising his own best and presumably distinctive qualification, a candidate behind his own curve.



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For years now, the Bush administration has been steadfast in refusal to engage in direct negotiations with Iran over the issues of uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons — direct talks that Sen. Barack Obama, McCain’s challenger, has publicly supported for months.

The administration, of course, changed course, approving the appearance of a senior U.S. official, William J. Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, at a July 19 meeting of Iranian officials. This was right around the same time the Bushies announced plans to explore the opening of a U.S. Interests Section in Tehran — a necessary precursor to outright diplomatic relations.



For many months, McCain has trumpeted his bona fides on matters of prosecuting the elective war in Iraq, and loudly criticized Obama for his 16-month timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces in Iraq.

Before Obama’s foreign tour, the senator from Arizona was relentless in attacking both the Obama timetable and Obama’s qualifications to even have a timetable.

McCain was, of course, baldy trumped — chumped? — by Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, who endorsed Obama’s 16-month proposal as fully achievable given the evolution of events on the ground in Iraq, and the expectation of that evolution continuing.

In a heartbeat, McCain’s lock on anything approaching singular wisdom on dealing the Iraq war vanished.

And almost as suddenly, the Straight Talk Express made a wild U-turn.



“I think it’s a pretty good timetable,” McCain said Friday in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room,’’ before volunteering his Iraq-war boilerplate: that withdrawal be based “on the conditions on the ground.’’

Blitzer asked McCain why he thought Maliki had backed the 16-month scenario.

“He said it’s a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground,’’ McCain said. “I think it’s a pretty good timetable, as we should — or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground. This success is very fragile. It’s incredibly impressive, but very fragile. …”

“He only had one message to stay on-message with,” said HarrytheHat at HuffPost, “and he couldn't even manage that.”

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What’s evolving “on the ground” is a gathering sense that McCain’s campaign is expedient to a fault; right now he’s not just making pivots and adjustments but flat-out reversals on policies he was thought to have owned.

Richard Clarke, the always on-message former national counterterrorism adviser, saw this latest McCain self-destruction weeks ago, on the July 14 “Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC — taking note of a developing disconnect between McCain and … McCain.

“There’s a kind of interesting phenomenon going on. Obama is saying things that turn out later to be obvious and true, and even the Bush administration has to admit it and start doing what Obama was on to months before they were. And yet, McCain is the national security expert?”

As pragmatism replaces posturing, as stagecraft aligns with substance, we’re finding that Barack Obama has an increasingly secure sense of what’s required to be President of the United States.

As the clutch on the transmission of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express grinds hard, the man behind the wheel is finding it hard to get a signal on his phone. The prospects are real that his best chances for assuming the presidency have been self-disconnected and are no longer in service.
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Image credits: McCain and the Jurassic phone: The Huffington Post. Obama/Petraeus/Hagel: Staff Sgt. Lorie Jewell, USAF (Public domain)

Welcome to the Obamalympics

While the Obama not-quite World Tour was underway, the Obama presidential campaign announced something probably meant to address one of the vexing issues for the campaign, a catechism from the punditburo and the McCain campaign that “no one knows who Barack Obama is.”

It’s a debatable point in the first place; Obama has in short order powerfully made known his presence as a national political figure of note; and with the deal in Berlin, that recognition has clearly taken on a global dimension.

If you don’t know who Barack Obama is by now, you’ve been living under a rock. If you don’t know who Barack Obama is by the end of the Beijing Olympic Games, you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the ocean.

Advertising Age reported Wednesday that the Obama campaign will be among the television sponsors of NBC Sports coverage of the Beijing Games, set to begin Aug. 8. Ad Age reports that Team Obama has purchased a $5 million package of Olympics spots that includes network TV as well as cable ads, in what Ad Age said was “the first significant network-TV buy for any presidential candidate in at least 12 years.”

The Obama campaign would join a parade of high-profile conventional advertisers including Adidas, McDonald's, Nike, Visa and Anheuser-Busch.

"Both the scale and the scope makes Obama's buy unprecedented," said Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, to The New York Times. "This is going beyond the battleground states; this is coverage that the entire country sees. It sort of validates his 50-state posture."

That’s one way of looking at it. We wonder, though, if all this is a bit … over the top. It’s one thing to rightfully assume the world stage as a natural extension of reaching not just the nation you hope to run, but also the world you hope to lead.

But a big-ass ad buy like this takes campaign “branding” to new levels. The last thing a candidate wants to be seen as is inauthentic, disposable, one-dimensional. The danger with this strategy from Team Obama is that verges on overexposure; and it reinforces the idea of Obama as product, not a good idea when you’re trying to connect viscerally with the electorate.

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We know the Obama campaign will use the time to advance the Obama agenda and proposals, and to make Obama’s case for his approach to leadership in the White House.

But it just doesn’t feel right. There’s a hint of über-alles, flood-the-senses domination about it, something that seems to undercut the drive for a more populist contact with people.

Then again, what’s more populist than TV? Arnold Schwarzenegger used the tube to launch his bid for the governorship of California on “The Tonight Show,” trading yuks with Jay Leno. Reaching people where they live.

Still. We’re just saying. Putting your campaign agenda on the same perceptual par with sneakers and beer may not be wise, or even necessary. There's some risk involved in putting your money where your mouth is when your mouth is doing what money can't do to begin with.
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Image credits: Obama: Public domain. NBC Sports logo ©2008 NBC Sports/NBC Universal.

Ich bin ein Bürger der Welt

It’s about a mile west of the Brandenburg Gate, and it’s been maligned as a tribute to Prussia’s brute military defeat of three of its neighbors. But today the Siegesschul, the Victory Column that graces Berlin’s Tiergarten Park, was site of a kind of world sociopolitical Woodstock. This time there was only one player; it was Sen. Barack Obama in the role of Jimi Hendrix, and like Hendrix, Obama unfurled his own Star-Spangled Banner, but this time with global overtures.



In what may have been the most anticipated campaign address in American political history, and certainly the one geographically farthest from the American political arena, Obama took the stage before an estimated 200,000 people and began to redraw the world’s perception of the United States of America.

And more: In a speech that touched on a range of global issues — race relations, environmental concerns, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, immigration and the need to refortify the trans-Atlantic alliance — Obama grafted the themes of commonality he frequently used in the primary campaign onto a message for global consumption: now is the time to look for what connects us, rather than what conflicts us.

“I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before,” he said. “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.”

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In Obama’s rhetorical hands, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was symbolic of the need to tear down walls of race and ethnicity, governmental suspicion and class warfare, in Germany, the United States and the world beyond.

“The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," he said. "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

“In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common. In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe’s role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth – that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.

“Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more – not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity. …

“People of Berlin – and people of the world – the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.”

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The point of the event, the centerpiece of Obama’s tour of Europe and the Middle East, was for Obama to deliver what the campaign called “a major speech on the historic U.S.-German partnership, and the need to strengthen Transatlantic relations to meet 21st century challenges.” But implicit in his presence, just his being there, Obama announced something more revelatory to Europe, the world, and the folks back home.

Obama reached for global commonalities, and more. He never uttered these words, but he might as well have, in a tweak of President Kennedy’s statement at the nearby Brandenburg Gate: Ich bin ein Amerikaner. I am an American, and I represent a new iteration of the country you thought you knew. For Germany — struggling with its own problems with unemployment, an economy under challenge and the fractious process of integrating foreigners into its society — Obama may seem like exactly the distillation of intelligence, toughness and pragmatism its citizens have come to expect from the United States.

And for the crowd in Berlin, Obama ratified both the possibilities of a black man, and of a recalibration of American potential. For the first time since the ascension of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — and in a political context the first time ever — a black man assumed the default position of what defines an American to the world. It can't have been lost on the Berlin crowd, or the millions who watched around the world, that this son of America embodies the ethnic mosaic America has long purported to be.

“Germans differentiate between America and the Bush administration. They are not anti-American per se; on the contrary,” said Andreas Etges, a Berlin professor and museum curator, to Stephanie Kirchner of Time. “Obama, not only because of his skin color, for many represents the other, better America.”

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Some have proposed that Europe’s obsession with all things Obama may be a way for Europeans to exorcise the demons of their own countries’ troubled history with racial assimilation by embracing the stranger from far away.

“It's a vicarious thrill,” said Reginald Dale, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Europe Program. “After they've switched off their TV screens they're not going to go out and find a black candidate to put forward to lead their own country,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

But what European Obamamania is all about may, ironically, have less to do with Obama than with what Obama represents: a United States returning to the ideals and aspirations that made America the place all countries aspired to be. The ideals and aspirations that make America the nation that America aspires to be.

That’s what Barack Obama symbolized today: another idea of the United States, a fresh version of a familiar favorite — a nation not exactly New! but quite likely, almost probably, soon to be Improved.

The McCain scrutiny XI

As if the last thirty-six weeks of the presidential campaign of John McCain weren’t confirmation enough of a candidate and a campaign leadership facing an uphill challenge of their own creation, the last thirty-six hours have made it clearer still. Sisyphus had it easy by comparison.

By now you’ve heard and seen the toweringly transparent existential relativism McCain & crew insist is reality concerning the U.S. troop escalation in Iraq known as “the surge.” We won’t waste time and bandwidth spelling it all out; the videos that follow are instructive:





This major mistake, this two-part jumble of the very chronology of one of the pillars of McCain’s purported foreign-policy expertise is important for what it reveals about the Arizona senator’s qualifications to be president — in fact, for what it seems to reveal about his basic character.

This serial error strongly suggests McCain’s inability to see how the “surge” as a polish for his presidential bona fides— and the value of the “surge” as a weapon to beat Sen. Barack Obama with politically — are only as good as the reason for starting a war in Iraq.

And there wasn’t any.

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Since President Bush formally established that flood-the-zone policy in Iraq, in January 2007, John McCain has been more than along for the ride. He’s made much of his early support for the administration “surge,” almost making you think he thought of it. And in the heat of the primary campaign, and especially now in the runup to the general, McCain has appropriated the “surge” and his backing of it as the central argument — the spearhead, if you will — of his attack on Barack Obama’s fitness to serve as commander-in-chief.

His latest “surge”-related campaign soundbite was thisclose to accusing Barack Obama of sedition, the not-so-distant cousin of treason.



Set aside for now that virtual slander of Obama. Consider how the “surge” has formed both the bedrock of McCain’s militarist narrative, and (with Nuri al-Maliki’s call for U.S. troops to leave Iraq) the foundation of his own political undoing.

Those who trumpet the success of the “surge” can’t get around the underlying and broader failure of the war in Iraq itself. Despite its apparent status as a positive military development, the “surge” is a success at the service of a failure, a fragile but quantifiable upside to an ill-conceived and increasingly ruinous war — the same one Barack Obama has said repeatedly “should never have been waged.” The same war Obama has opposed all along.

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Whatever traction McCain gains politically by virtue of the “surge” is defeated by the fact that the “surge” was a good decision that should never have had to be made in the first place.

Now that Maliki has summoned the political confidence to call for U.S. forces to exit his country, McCain is a victim of the “surge”’s success. His main rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq has largely vanished. With a national mood overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq, McCain’s most unassailable foreign-policy tagline — “He Backed the Surge” — has declining political value, especially to the plurality of Americans who opposed the war since before the “surge” existed.

McCain, and by extension the Bush administration, are prisoners of the “surge,” so much so that they’ve conceded the metrics of victory and defeat to the proverbial Enemy. Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, saw this [“Countdown,” MSNBC, Monday]:

“The problem for John McCain and George Bush is this: They have defined leaving as losing. Therefore, ergo, we cannot ever leave. It’s always tomorrow or some time on the horizon … at a certain point, it starts to feel like ‘Waiting for Godot.’ No matter what they say, the stage directions keep saying, ‘do not move.’”

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There’s another possible factor in the equation: the possibility that the forces of terrorist chaos and their enablers now loose in Iraq might be in stand-down mode — creating fewer acts of violence, fewer IED explosions, fewer clashes with U.S. forces — not solely because of the “surge” but also because of their collective anticipation of a change in leadership, and policy, in the United States.

As the “surge” evolved after the arrival of the forces needed to fight it (in June 2007), so too evolved a U.S. presidential campaign that became a referendum on the Iraq war, and a regularity of polling that reflected growing popular opposition to the war.

McCain is already at least nominally on board the idea of withdrawing troops. “By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,” he said in May. “The Iraq War has been won.”

And with Obama long committed to withdrawing those troops on a shorter timeframe/plane/horizon/continuum than that, one of the key emotional motivators behind the terrorists in Iraq has been undercut, no matter who wins in November. What’s been conventionally described as success by “surge” may have as much to do with expectations of the future in Washington as with events of the present day in Baghdad.

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Maybe that’s speculation, but what’s true is the damage done to McCain by his growing litany of errors and distortions on matters of foreign policy and the military — from juxtaposing Iran and Pakistan when they have no common borders to trivializing the idea of military action against another country (“bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”); from confusing Sudan and Somalia to mixing-up Sunni and Shi’a; from misstating his presence on the Senate floor for a vote condemning a Islamic terrorist organization to denying he voted against proposals to increase health-care funding for veterans when his voting record shows he did.

More than once. More than twice.

What’s true is the likelihood that the “surge” as a political weapon for John McCain is subject to diminishing returns: the more it’s used, the less effective it becomes — especially against a nimble, confident opponent who opposed the war that made the “surge” not just possible but necessary.

What’s true is that the Vladimir and Estragon of John McCain and George Bush remain yoked to an unnecessary war, waiting for the Godot of Victory.

One leaves the stage for certain on Jan. 20th, the other may well have left in November.

And neither of them has a clue what Godot looks like.
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Image credit: Waiting for Godot cover: Unknown.

Bid, no trump

It’s curious that in the instantly level playing field of 24/7 communications in the Internet age, there’s still the idea that a vast geographic distance makes a difference in sending or receiving a message. Because that thinking persists, Sen. Barack Obama’s continuing tour of Europe and the Middle East — he’s in Israel today — has given Sen. John McCain the chance to have the domestic political stage pretty much to himself.

Naturally, Team McCain has been working on how to steal some of Obama’s thunder — the big impact he’s already made in his meetings with leaders of Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan, and the huge splash he’s likely to make tomorrow when he speaks in Berlin. Right-wing attack dog journalist Robert Novak reported yesterday that:

“Sources close to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign are suggesting he will reveal the name of his vice presidential selection this week while Sen. Barack Obama is getting the headlines on his foreign trip. The name of McCain's running mate has not been disclosed, but Mitt Romney has led the speculation recently.”

It was a somewhat blatant bid to steal a march on the building Obama juggernaut, and it followed by days McCain’s appearance on all the network morning TV shows, and the release of a new and blazingly ridiculous McCain television ad that actually blames the current gas-price crisis on … Senator Obama.



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McCain’s attempt to trump the Obama not-quite-World Tour is likely to fail for reasons basic to both politics and television. Simply put, Obama’s positions (and his consistency of expressing those positions) make for good politics; Obama’s personality, rhetorical gifts and inherent novelty as a candidate make for good TV.

McCain truly has the domestic media arena to himself; the news anchors and producers that could effectively shift the focus to McCain are traveling with Obama right now. It’s not about padding their frequent-flier mileage, either. Whether McCain’s team likes it or not, the anchors’ physical presence sets the locational agenda for what the media decides is important, based on their reading of popular interest and the potential for the visual drama that is TV’s lifeblood. Right now, the anticipated frisson of Obama speaking at the Victory Column in Berlin has captured their imagination.

(And that of the Germans. Jefferson Chase of Deutsche Welle reports today that "[O]ne of Berlin's main city magazines offered its readership cut-out American flags to wave at Barack Obama's planned address.")

True enough, the media focus would move if McCain does announce a running mate this week, but only briefly. The media loves a surprise, and Romney’s name has been bandied about as a veep pick for literally months, along with others. Other prospects that may be more surprising (former homeland security chief Tom Ridge, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty) are correspondingly less exciting and less likely.

McCain the maverick may need to be something of a magician. In the wake of two calamitous weeks, and yesterday’s news of a major gaffe of recent history vis-à-vis Iraq and the troop escalation known as “the surge,” and a misplacing of the borders of Iran and Pakistan, McCain needs the deus ex machina of a rabbit pulled from a hat to move the media’s attention, and much of the nation’s, to his center stage.

The right running-mate choice, though, guarantees him prime-time coverage. Hey —

Maybe he’ll pick George Bush!
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Image credit: Bush and Romney: Reuters, via Huffington Post

The Truman Show

“I think the problem if you’re John McCain and you’re watching the scenes that have been playing out overseas [is that] the Americans are finally being greeted as liberators. The problem is, they’re the Americans getting off the plane with Barack Obama.”



Ebony/Jet columnist Del Walters, speaking today on MSNBC's "Hardball," thus nails the challenge of perception facing the Arizona senator, the same challenge that Obama has so far responded to in masterful terms. On what is nominally a campaign trip but really a global coming-out party for the junior senator from Illinois, Obama has burnished his bona fides in a whirlwind trip that’s so far combined a hoorah for American troops, numerous visits to world leaders of consequence and — in a press conference today — a reassertion of the civilian leadership of the U.S. military, an unequivocal line in the sand to those who’ve supplanted the commander-in-chief with the commander on the ground.

“What I’ve consistently said is that my job, should I be commander-in-chief, is to set a vision, a strategic vision, of what’s best for U.S. national security,” Obama said today in Amman, Jordan. “I strongly believe that what is best for U.S. national security is to initiate a phased withdrawal and to set a timeframe that’s very consistent with what the Iraqis are now saying, and can be accomplished.”

“The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders tell me to do, or I’m ignoring their advice. No, I’m factoring in their advice but placing it in this broader strategic framework that’s required.”

It was an expansive way, of course, of saying The Buck Stops Here — of reviving the spirit of strong command responsibility that President Truman distilled in those four words. But it was also a throwdown to those who figured Obama couldn’t handle the moment of world exposure, or the ones who thought he’d do the okey-doke and concede the broad “strategic vision” of the U.S.-Iraqi military situation to the generals. Like President Bush has done, more or less consistently, since the Iraq war began.

The Truman Doctrine was its own line in the sand against a perceived bid for world domination by the Soviets; philosophically, the W Doctrine ain’t much different; it still promulgates a binary, us-vs-them, zero-sum-game view of the world and everyone in it.

Barack Obama appears to have the good political sense to know that, whatever geopolitical doctrine may bear his name in years to come, a policy starts with an in-house doctrine of accountability — a willingness to own responsibility for the vision that sets things in motion, for better or worse.

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Obama’s Amman address was one of those moments over the last five days that have helped solidify the idea of a President Obama in the world’s mind’s eye. The cosmetics of this tour — the visuals you’ll be seeing in Team Obama campaign ads from next week until November — couldn’t have been better. Obama huddling with U.S. Gen. David Petraeus; Obama sitting in conference with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president; Obama walking with Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister; Obama with King Abdullah of Jordan (before Obama rode shotgun in the King’s Mercedes back to the airport, with the monarch at the wheel).



Anything can happen, of course. Israel, Germany, France and the UK are dead ahead. The biggest challenge may be addressing the ever-delicate Israeli-Palestinian issues, a farrago of history that’s snagged more than one well-meaning American. But to this point, Barack Obama has hardly disappointed the folks back home. On the contrary: he’s proven himself a master of international stagecraft and someone with a solid command of the need for the kind of overarching vision that has been (being charitable) a more infrequent thing for the Bushies.

Meanwhile, back at the McCain campaign, the whiteboards are out, the Maalox is flowing freely and the Arizona senator may be regretting his recent complaints that Obama hadn’t seen things on the ground in other countries, that he didn’t know enough of the world to be the leader of the world’s leader. For McCain, the chance to have the stage to himself must have initially seemed like answered prayers.

But we’ve heard of their dangers before.

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.”
— Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
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Image credit: Harry S. Truman: Public domain.