It's the war, Dems, it's the war!

Tom Hayden, who is currently an enthusiastic Obama supporter, Makes a couple of very important points about the Presidential race in McCain Flying High Again; Obama Edging Past Clinton; Clinton Facing Mass Skepticism Huffington Post 02/13/08. While McCain's "maverick" reputation is mostly phony, his personal story as a Vietnam veteran and prisoner of war does have a strong emotional appeal. "McCain is a worthy Republican candidate," he writes, "with an understated heroism of character, able to win independents and Western voters, who tends to be trusted by Americans who feel threatened by war." He cautions the Dems against trying to focus the campaign against him on "issues of age, character or temperament". Instead:

The real issues which many Democratic consultants and insiders fear to address are Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and "national security". They are haunted by the party's anti-war past, even though they understand that the Vietnam war was a disaster. McCain's strategists smell this Democratic vulnerability. They will try to achieve a bipartisan consensus that there is something called "Islamo-fascism", that the menace is unified, and that it is evil, that it can be confronted only by military force. Thus they can force Democrats into arguing that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan, that Marines should be transferred from Baghdad to Kabul in a downward spiral of fighting al Qaeda. They may find themselves trapped in McCain's battlefield of assumptions. (my emphasis)

The Democrats can't afford to screw this up in the fall election.

Because the bold Maverick is highly vulnerable on his support for the Iraq War. The fact that he is essentially calling for an open-ended fight tells me two things. One is that he's operating on the conservative stab-in-the-back dogma that says the US lost the Vietnam War only because the gutless public and the wimpy politicians lost their Will. The other is that he really has no clue how to bring American involvement in the Iraq War to a resolution.

Joe Conason in McCain's risky strategy Salon 02/15/08 about the Straight Talker's political weak point on the Iraq War. The Maverick, he explains, is basing his campaign on putting over a perception that The Surge is achieving brilliant succes:

One year after the first deployments of the American troop escalation in February 2007, proponents of the Iraq war have unanimously proclaimed "the surge" a smashing success. "We are winning," they proclaim on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and the New York Post (as well as in periodicals not owned by Rupert Murdoch).

Nearly everyone culpable in creating and prolonging this disastrous intervention describes the latest perceived success as a triumph over the forces of disorder and terror - and none more than Sen. John McCain, whose presidential aspirations may well depend on perception of progress toward "victory."

The American Prospect Online has been poking holes in McCain's Maverick image:

The Maverick Myth by Paul Waldman The American Prospect Online 02/12/08

Charmless Offensive by Steve Benen The American Prospect Online 04/03/07

The McCain Charade by Robert Kuttner The American Prospect Online 10/02/06

Tags: joe conason, mccain, tom hayden