Stumper’s take: Is it just me, or does McCain risk seeming a little monomaniacal in a general election battle? For months, Obama and Clinton have ranged widely over the vast landscape of challenges confronting America, while McCain has focused like a laserbeam on national security, his strongest suit. It’s clear that the Arizona senator will spend much of his time and energy between now and November painting Obama (his putative opponent) as a needless neophyte risk in a dangerous time. But Obama is so dexterous at defining the debate that I imagine he’ll quickly use this one-sidedness to his advantage: Yes, Iraq is important, he’ll say. But is it all we care about? Or do we want to deal with health care, the economy and education, too?Compared to Obama or Clinton, McCain is painfully short on domestic policy proposals. The more he harps on national security and Iraq–a war, by the way, that two-thirds of America currently opposes–the more he forces swing voters to decide what worries them more: the possibility of an attack–or, you know, everything else. It’s a risky fight to pick.
Many in the commentariat pounced on Wednesday’s sharp exchange over Iraq between John McCain and Barack Obama as a preview of the general election debate, should the Illinois senator get the Democratic nomination. But the dustup between the two leading candidates also gave us a glimpse into the growing divide within the U.S. military over how to split resources between Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indeed, the presidential campaign this year could also become a Pentagon proxy war, with Sen. McCain largely taking the side of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Obama more representing the interests of the Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, who opposed the Bush-Petraeus “surge” and has openly worried about an Army that’s “out of balance.”
McCain and Obama fired at each other from two separate events Wednesday. Campaigning in Texas, McCain mocked Obama for suggesting that he would send troops back into Iraq “if Al Qaeda is forming a base there,” as debate moderator Tim Russert put it. The Arizona Republican, assuming his already patented posture of the steady statesman correcting the bumbling upstart, said, “I have some news for Sen. Obama. Al Qaeda is in Iraq.”
Hearing those remarks while stumping in Ohio, Obama was plainly intent on showing that he will brook no such treatment. “I have some news for John McCain,” he shot back, “and that is that there was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade … They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11, and that would be Al Qaeda in Afghanistan that is stronger now than at any time since 2001.”
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