At a townhall meeting Thursday in Wisconsin, John McCain answered a question about Iraq strategy with a typically sunny vote of confidence. “I can tell you that it is succeeding,” he said. “I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet.”
It didn’t take long for Obama to pounce. After days of Mesopotamian attacks from McCain–most slamming Obama for not traveling to Iraq to see the “facts on the ground”–the Illinois senator’s team quickly organized a conference call to question the Arizonan’s own knowledge of the situation. Exhibit A: troop levels, which currently stand at 155,000–or 25,000 more than what would constitute a “pre-surge” force. “I assume Senator McCain just doesn’t know the facts here,” said Wisconsin Gov. (and Obama supporter) Jim Doyle on the conference call; Sen. John Kerry concurred, then brought up a list of other Iraq gaffes–including McCain’s classic “Sunni-Shite” slip–to hammer the point home. Then, just in case anyone missed the boat, Obama’s press shop gleefully flooded reporters’ inboxes with five (count ’em five) emails reminding us of McCain’s mistake.
The problem? McCain was technically wrong–but essentially right. So far, three of the five brigades added during the surge have been rotated out, and the other two are in the process of leaving. By the beginning of July–one month away–troop levels will have fallen to 140,000, according a transcript of a February news briefing with Joint Staff director for operations Lt. Gen. Carter Ham. That’s only 5,000 more soldiers than were stationed in Iraq before surge–and all of them, according to military officials, will be support personnel, not combat troops. McCain’s fundamental point–that the surge is ending–is true. “What informed people understand, John McCain included, is that American troops are not even close to surge levels,” said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.
So why is Obama choosing to portray McCain’s slightly accelerated vision of the drawdown as a damnable display of cluelessness? It’s not to argue that McCain is ignorant about Iraq–considering his national-security bona fides, most voters aren’t really going to buy that. And it’s not even to prove, as Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan put, that the Republican is “far more interested in stubbornly making the case for continuing a failed policy… than in getting the facts right.” (Although some would say he has a point.) It’s something deeper. When Sen. Kerry tied McCain’s “pre-surge” statement to other his foreign-policy fumbles, he was establishing a pattern–a pattern that shows the Arizona senator repeatedly failing to keep his details straight. The unspoken implication? Maybe McCain can’t help it. For the majority of voters who already consider McCain a military expert–but worry, as 40 percent of Americans do, about his age–this explanation (the “Grandpa Simpson” analogy, if you will) probably makes more sense than ignorance. He’s not uninformed, they might conclude. Just a little mixed up. At 72, McCain would be the oldest man ever inaugurated president–meaning that “mixed up” is by far the most damaging adjective that could be affixed to his name. Which is why Obama isn’t exactly preventing it from being affixed.
If Team Obama’s onslaught–seizing on a forgivable slip to reinforce a larger, more damaging narrative about your opponent–isn’t politics as usual, I don’t know what is. McCain, who also claims to favor substance over sniping, hasn’t exactly acquitted himself well on this front, either. His assertion the Mosul is “quiet” was patently false–yesterday alone, two car bombings in the area killed at least 20 Iraqis–and his “pre-surge” defense (that this was a simple matter of “verb tense”) was Clintonian (if not Orwellian) in its typical Beltway slippery-ness (“Mission Accomplished Soon,” anyone?). Not to mention that McCain’s offer of a joint trip to Iraq was a total “political stunt,” to borrow Obama’s phrase. That said, Obama was the aggressor here. For any Democrats who feared that their nominee would bring a knife to a gun fight, fear not. Your prayers are answered. Still, with both candidates already carrying on like every other politician since Cicero, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll bask in the glow of their much-ballyhooed “new kind of politics” anytime before November 4–at the earliest.
Oh well.
