Why Not John McCain #4 - Would You Like A Flop With That Flip?

An article in today's Washington Post looks at some problems McCain has been having with defining his campaign:

...they are trying to walk this tightrope between creating distance from Bush and not angering the base," said a Michigan Republican operative who described himself as nervous about McCain's chances of victory in that swing state...Another Republican strategist, who worked for a rival GOP campaign during the primary and has ties to Bush's political team, said the McCain team has "not really figured out" how to present McCain to voters: as an experienced conservative leader or a reformer who wants change..."who John McCain is and what he stands for -- it's a little hard to connect all the dots."

It has indeed become difficult to understand what John McCain stands for:

- He fought the Bush administration on torture, and stated he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, yet he voted AGAINST banning waterboarding, and called the recent Supreme Court decision establishing limited habeas corpus rights to detainess one of the worst decisions in the America's history (yes, worse than the ones that called slaves property, or that upheld segregation).

- He spoke out for years against the reckless Bush tax cuts, but now wholeheartedly endorses them as the bedrock of his economic plan.

- He was against offshore oil drilling before he was for it.

- He now states that he would not even vote for his own immigration plan, probably because he found that it was not supported by his conservative base.

- He speaks out against lobbyists and "pork" but has turned out to have a staff full of lobbyists. Just one recent instance: McCain had a large role in killing a wasteful government deal with Boeing to develop new planes for refueling. But it has recently been revealed that McCain is also being closely advised by lobbyists for the Boeing competitor that instead received the contract.

And perhaps most importantly, Frank Rich recalls some of McCain's biggest changes in judgment about Iraq:

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

Anyhow these are just some flip-flops in what will likely be an ever expanding list. Or as this clip from MSNBC states "McCain Flip Flops on Everything":
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The Radical Elitist

A great Op-Ed in today's Washington Post, "Wright and Ridiculous" points out the contradictions between all the attacks narratives being thrown against Obama (thanks to my dad and Teresa for forwarding it!):

First Obama was accused of anti-religious elitism. Then he was accused of identifying with the underclass anger of his spiritual mentor. Excuse me, but which is it? Am I supposed to believe that Obama is a supercilious elitist or a menacing ghetto radical? Is he contemptuous of religion or too close to a religious leader? Obama's critics don't bother to say. Meanwhile, real character issues go relatively unheeded.

And questions whether these issues honestly reflect a leader's character:

The real character issue, in this campaign as in others, comes down to one thing: Does a candidate have the guts to espouse positions that are not politically expedient? Here there are serious questions about Obama, who pledges to pull out of Iraq no matter what, and who promises both to increase spending and not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $200,000 to $250,000 a year, ensuring the perpetuation of crippling federal deficits. For that matter, there are serious questions about Hillary Clinton, who proposes an irresponsible gas-tax holiday, and about John McCain, who couples gas pandering with a flip-flop on the Bush tax cuts, which he once (correctly) viewed as unaffordable. But these genuine character issues have been shunted aside by the spectacle of Obama's falling-out with his preacher.

Read it! Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Si, Se Puede!

Bill Richardson, '08 presidential candidate, Bill Clinton's Ambassador to the UN and later Secretary of Energy, and current Governor of New Mexico endorsed Obama today in a speech far more rousing than any I saw from him during the campaign (hey Bill - I like the beard too!) He was clearly inspired by Obama's speech earlier this week.


In a statement released earlier today, he said:

My affection and admiration for Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton will never waver. It is time, however, for Democrats to stop fighting amongst ourselves and to prepare for the tough fight we will face against John McCain in the fall...Barack Obama will be a historic and a great President, who can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home and with our allies abroad.

Also - significantly from the '08 Democratic candidate with some of the most extensive foreign policy - he takes on Hillary's "commander-in-chief" threshold argument:

"There is no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama has the judgment and courage we need in a commander in chief when our nation's security is on the line," Richardson said. "He showed this judgment by opposing the Iraq war from the start, and he has shown it during this campaign by standing up for a new era in American leadership internationally."

Full transcript of his speech here, and reporting on his endorsements here and here Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Punch/Counter-Punch

In a speech today on Iraq, Hillary Clinton said the following:
"Senator Obama holds up his original opposition to the war on the campaign trail, but he didn't start working aggressively to end the war until he started running for president. So when he had a chance to act on his speech, he chose silence instead." And implied that Obama would be dependent on advisors, and won't match "words with actions."

Obama's campaign produced a video response:



Whether the vote was a vote for war or not I recapped in this post, along with headlines from that day.

I myself would add: Hillary herself not only was originally for the war, but only came out strongly for withdrawal in the midst of democratic primary, when it was necessary to do so.
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The "Obama I Know"

A revealing look at Obama from University of Chicago constitutional law colleague Cass Sunstein in the Chicago Tribune. Highly recommended!

Not so long ago, the phone rang in my office. It was Barack Obama. For more than a decade, Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago Law School.

He is also a friend. But since his election to the U.S. Senate, he does not exactly call every day.

On this occasion, he had an important topic to discuss: the controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance of international telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists. I had written a short essay suggesting that the surveillance might be lawful. Before taking a public position, Obama wanted to talk the problem through.In about 20 minutes, he and I investigated the legal details. He asked me to explore all sorts of issues: the president's power as commander in chief, the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Authorization for Use of Military Force and more.

Obama wanted to consider the best possible defense of what Bush had done. To every argument I made, he listened and offered a counterargument. After the issue had been exhausted, Obama said he thought the program was illegal, but now had a better understanding of both sides. He thanked me for my time.

This was a pretty amazing conversation, not only because of Obama's mastery of the legal details, but also because many prominent Democratic leaders had already blasted the Bush initiative as blatantly illegal. He did not want to take a public position until he had listened to, and explored, what might be said on the other side.

This is the Barack Obama I have known for nearly 15 years -- a careful and evenhanded analyst of law and policy, unusually attentive to multiple points of view.

Here's another excerpt, read the whole thing here:

The Obama we know is no rhetorician; he shines not because he can move people, but because of his problem-solving abilities, creativity and attention to detail.

In recent weeks, his speaking talents, and the cultlike atmosphere that occasionally surrounds him, have led people to wonder whether there is substance behind the plea for "change" -- whether the soaring phrases might disguise emptiness and vagueness. But nothing could be further from the truth. He is most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail.

I do not deny that skeptics are raising legitimate questions. After all, Obama has served in the U.S. Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the world?

Obama speaks of "change," but will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short time? What if he fails? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him from criticisms and challenges on the part of his advisers -- and, in view of his relative youth, criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.

Fortunately, the candidate's campaign proposals offer strong and encouraging clues about how he would govern; what makes them distinctive is that they borrow sensible ideas from all sides.

He is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows he appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. He is not only focused on details but is also a uniter, both by inclination and on principle.

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Heckuva Job, Hillary!

Have discussed this before here and here, but the NY Times looks at how Hillary has managed her campaign organization as an indicator of what kind of leader she is, finding some frightening parallels:

“She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”

Even more troubling, however, is how her own tendencies toward loyalty, sound horrifyingly similar to our current president's management:

Still, interviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest that Mrs. Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager. Juggling the demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated decisions large and small and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Mrs. Clinton accepted or seemed unaware of the intense factionalism and feuding that often paralyzed her campaign and that prevented her aides from reaching consensus on basic questions like what states to fight in and how to go after Mr. Obama, of Illinois.

Mrs. Clinton showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants, and her insistence on staying with them even when friends urged her to shake things up, was blamed by some associates for the campaign’s woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.

Yikes.
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Been There, Done That

Hillary said this yesterday, and its caused some hubbub:

I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know that Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.

Besides being unfair to Obama's actual record, the problem is that here is that she has just given John McCain a bite he can use in every ad he might have to run against Obama showing he doesn't have support of his own party. Its one thing to attack, its another thing to be willing to throw your party's potential candidate under the bus.

But it also hinges on the "experience" issue which Hillary has banked so much on, and which I have repeatedly discussed and dissected on this page. (Not to mention that if she goes into a general election against McCain with experience as her argument - he wins!)

But someone's found a classic Hillary clip that shows how that experience doesn't necessarily lead to good decision making.

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Who you gonna call?

So on Friday, Hillary's campaign releases this fear mongering ad on TV in Texas and Ohio:

Her campaign describes it as a "positive" ad. Afterwards, her campaign had a conference call with reporters to discuss it, as described on the National Journal's blog (w/audio):

Responding to the release of HRC's new TX TV ad, which asserts in no subtle terms that only she has the experience to deal with a major world crisis, and, relatedly, to keep your children safe, Slate's John Dickerson asked the obvious question:

"What foreign policy moment would you point to in Hillary's career where she's been tested by crisis?" he said.

Silence on the call. You could've knit a sweater in the time it took the usually verbose team of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Lee Feinstein, Clinton's national security director, to find a cogent answer. And what they came up with was weak -- that she's been endorsed by many high ranking members of the uniformed military.

Obama's campaign impressively whipped up their own response the same day:

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Brain Trust

Great New Republic article, "The Audacity of Data," about Obama's main policy advisors with the crucial judgement:

Despite Obama's reputation for grandiose rhetoric and utopian hope-mongering, the Obamanauts aren't radicals--far from it. They're pragmatists--people who, when an existing paradigm clashes with reality, opt to tweak that paradigm rather than replace it wholesale. As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

Good especially for those who harbor some strange fear he is some ideological loose cannon - he's about pragmatic change. Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Are YOU Experienced?

Joe Klein at Time has an interesting take (that I've also seen separately mention at Andrew Sullivan's blog) on the experience issue: pointing out that with all three remaining candidates being senators without any actual executive experience, we should take a look at how they have run their campaigns.

If nothing else, a presidential campaign tests a candidate's ability to think strategically and tactically and to manage a very complex organization. We have three plausible candidates remaining--Obama, Clinton and John McCain--and Obama has proved himself the best executive by far. Both the Clinton and the McCain campaigns have gone broke at crucial moments. So much for fiscal responsibility. McCain has been effective only when he runs as a guerrilla; in both 2000 and '08, he was hapless at building a coherent campaign apparatus. Clinton's sins are different: arrogance and the inability to see past loyalty to hire the best people for the job and to fire those who prove inadequate. "If nothing else, we've learned that Obama probably has the ability to put together a smooth-running Administration," said a Clinton super-delegate. "That's pretty important."

ADDITIONALLY: Illuminating read: check "Inside the Clinton Shake Up" by Josh Greene at the Atlantic about how loyalty has determined who Clinton has running her campaign, in a frightening echo of how Bush has run things. (actually that article is really good -gonna explore more in its own post later) Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Why Obama Over Clinton?

The divisive political approach the Clinton campaign was using, especially during the SC race, was what propelled me to start this blog.

She is skilled but shackled by the "Wrong Experience"

How about judgment? She voted for Iraq.

She will say or do anything, including go back on her word, in order to win.

And there's Wal-Mart.

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Judgment: Right from Day One

In case we forget:

Every Democrat who voted for the Iraq war has fallen back on the "was just giving Bush the option but hoped he would pursue diplomatic avenues first" defense.  But lets not let foggy memory change the fact: there was no question to anyone at the time that the vote was authorizing WAR - whether it was cast by Clinton, Kerry, Edwards (who later apologized for his vote) or anyone else. No matter what dissenting statements or qualifiers they recorded for posterity on the Senate floor, the media and the American people knew what was being voted on. Bush I's National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft was publishing Op Eds in the month before pleading "Don't Attack Saddam." Check some headlines after the resolutions passed Congress:

CNN:

 "Senate approves war resolution: Administration applauds vote"

"House gives Bush authority for War with Iraq: Bush "US must confront Iraq fully and finally"

The Washington Post:

"Congress Passes Iraq Resolution. Overwhelming Approval Gives Bush Authority to Attack Unilaterally"

The fact is, if you remember, the Bush administration pushed up the vote in order to make it an issue for the Democrats in the upcoming election season. 

Clinton was fairly new to the Senate at that point, she was not running for reelection, but she did vote for the war. Why? Did she truly believe war was necessary? Was it political pressure? Was it a symptom of a sexist society: a female Senator having to prove she was "tough"?  Yet even then she had it both ways - she recorded a statement on the Senate floor stating she was not for a pre-emptive or unilateral war, yet she still voted for one. Was she, even then, doing what she thought was necessary for the future of her political career? 

Regardless of anything, I do think if anything shows someone's judgment, it is the decision to send people to risk - and sacrifice - their lives in a war. And I do think, in that, Clinton - and Kerry, and Edwards-failed. 

Obama admittedly didn't have to make that decision- at that time he was a state senator- but here is what he said in a speech after that vote:

Now let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein....He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

Pretty accurate - 5 years ago, before a single bomb fell. Before thousands of American lives, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were lost. Before billions of dollars spent, with no end or exit strategy yet in sight.
Judgment.

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