McCain Tries to Fight Back the Obama Surge as the Cracker Jack Candidate

You almost gotta love the sheer audacity of John McCain's recent ad called "Pump" which blames Barack Obama for rising gas prices. It's the kind of over-the-top commercial you'd expect from Jimmy Kimmel or Jay Leno comedy writers, not one coming from a Republican presidential nominee.

What will be McCain's next ad? Blaming Obama for the housing or banking crisis? Long lines to see Dark Knight? It's all Obama's fault!

You can understand the mounting, seething desperation of the McCain camp as it continues to throw up anti-Obama roadblocks. It's a difficult task, not just because Americans have been waiting decades for a JFK-like messianic leader, but because McCain is an undisciplined candidate. He's mercurial, temperamental, prone to fits of pique, and often makes odd travel choices on the campaign trail. While Obama basked in the Berlin limelight with 200,000 cheering Germans, McCain counterjabbed with a stop at a Columbus, Ohio hofbrau where he looked and acted flabbergasted, sounding more like a moody, petulant adult character on "Gossip Girls" than a future president. "I'm here in the American heartland, and he's over there in Europe campaigning," he harrumphed. For a guy born in the Panama Canal Zone, McCain will do everything in his power to depict Obama as the real foreigner, a non-American.

You can't fault McCain's frustration regarding his rival's domination of the media landscape the past week. While Obama strutted regally across the world stage, McCain saw the traveling press corps ignore him.

That hurts. But McCain's been there before, like when his lagged way behind in the polls during the early Republican primaries and stayed in budget motels with a single assistant. McCain has come back from the dead more than once. (The New Yorker might want to feature him as the Mummy for a cover.) He survived a North Vietnam prison camp for several years, he survived a cancer scare, he survived the free-for-all Republican primaries, By defying the odds and pundits, he emerged as the Last Man Standing in a crowded field. I think of "Survivor" when I think of McCain, He outwitted, outsmarted, and outlasted the GOP competition.

McCain knows he will survive the recent press honeymoon with Obama. He likes playing the role of underdog, and election day is still months away. While the polls can't be trusted so early in the game, whatever narrow lead Obama has over McCain can easily evaporate over a gaffe or shift in public opinion.

So for the time being anyway, McCain is like the Cracker Jack candidate. You never know what to expect from him or his staff. His genuine weirdness is part crazy uncle and part maverick politician who zigged and zagged his way to the nomination.

As Obama surges in popularity and star power, McCain has felt obliged to play his own surge card -- the Iraq one. But his argument that Iraq is safer and that the surge has reduced violence and that Obama was wrong to oppose the surge is full of holes. Iraq is still a dangerous place, with suicide bombings and murders and terror plaguing much of the country. Juan Cole, over at Informed Comment, whose blog is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the fluid, shaky, and uncertain path ahead for Iraq, says that one reason for the surge's partial success is that while American troops flooded into Baghdad, Shiite militia groups ethnically cleansed the nation's capital of a majority of the Sunni residents.

But the media, looking for a sound-bite news hook, can't bother with such internecine details, and instead like to focus on the more narrow question of who is more surge-centric: Obama or McCain. With the media, one always feels that they suffer from collective amnesia. Their obsession with the candidates' stance on the surge eclipses the larger issues regarding America's role in the Middle East, the horrendous foreign policy developments of the Bush administration which sanctions torture, the ruinous debt from the war, and so on. Instead, we have McCain crowing to television reporters, "I supported the surge! Obama didn't. He wants to lose the war. I don't!" And reporters asking Obama if he wished he had supported the surge.

McCain is able to milk what he sees as the successful troop surge because most Americans don't want to hear that he supported the costly and catastrophic war in the first place. This is Obama's trump card since he originally opposed the war. But the public is now less concerned about how or why the war started than it is about when American forces can leave Iraq without being labeled defeatists.

Bottom line: there will be no winners when the Iraq war reaches its denouement, if that is even possible. In five years, Iraq will probably be an Iranian puppet state, and my bet is that Moqtada Sadr and his minions will be the new rulers of the Green Zone. His men will have moved into the newly built U.S Embassy (which is the largest and most expensive in the world).

This, however, would not happen on McCain's watch. He'd dig his heels in the Iraqi sand, and fight to maintain American hegemony. But history is not on the side of occupiers in Iraq. Inevitably, Iraq will be ruled solely by Iraqis. The question becomes: how many American lives and dollars will be wasted to postpone this reality.

What McCain's incessant bleating about being right on supporting the surge fails to address is that the purpose of the surge was to create sufficient breathing room for the fractious Iraqi political parties to come together and create a less dysfunctional government. But too much distrust, mutual enmity, and bad blood exist for anyone to expect the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to reach a workable reconciliation.

A civil war is as likely post-surge as not. So while the U.S. government and military prop up a failed government in Iraq, our own government will be hard-pressed to meet the domestic needs of Americans. That's a big point that McCain typically glosses over, or rather distorts. When he spews nonsense about achieving a balanced budget within five years or that tax cuts will get the economy back on track, you have little confidence that McCain possesses the sound fiscal sense to run the country.

If, as many predict, that the election will be based on how voters feel about the economy and not the Iraq war, McCain has a tough road ahead. That is why we can expect to see his camp fiercely pound away at Obama for all sorts of economic woes like rising gas prices. We can look forward to more outlandish television ads from the Arizona senator. These negative attack ads will conflate and confuse the issues so as to make Obama look bad. Their relation to the truth is beside the point. They will seem like experiments in campaign dadaism.

Comments

[cassidynj]

If he did stay in budget hotels, he flew first class on his wife's personal jet, at no cost to the campaign, due to the exception he wrote into the campaign reform bill he co-authored!

[Gary50]

McCain stayed in budget motels? He could buy every motel he ever slept in and the effect on his finances would be like you or me buying a pack of gum.
I like your idea of John McCain being the Cracker Jack candidate. With Cracker Jacks you know you will get a "prize" but it will be a worhless piece of crap. That pretty much sums up McCain.
His motto should be "More wars, less jobs".

[ColoradoAngryRU]

Someone from the media needs to ask this question when Mc Same starts spouting "I want to win he wants to lose" bs. The question is as follows. Who, what, when, where, and why. Who will concede we have won.? What have we won? Where have we won? And last but not least why did we call it a win? These questions are all really simple journalism.

[4President]

The answers to your questions have already been determined. Will John McCain, in an Obama presidency really say that America and it's Army surrendered to the enemy once we've left? I don't think so. The war will called a success whenever and however. The nationalist attitudes require it. This whole thing has been debated through sound bytes and semantics.

You see how easily JSM sidestepped his time line blunder - just changed the meanings and our understanding of words. You thought the surge, as explained by the President was sending additional troops to Iraq as the President said in January; however, the surge is actually the whole thing made up of parts, one of which being additional troops, but is also completely responsible for the entirety of success. The surge, and apparently John McCain can be credited for the success of the surge!