Obama Was Right

by Todd Beeton
Mydd.com

Between John McCain's adoption of Obama's Afghanistan policy and now Iraq's endorsement of Obama's Iraq policy, there's a subtext that underpins Obama's entire trip to the Middle East: Obama was right, John McCain was wrong.

You know the Obama was right meme is beginning to penetrate when the press deigns to actually acknowledge it. Here's Howard Fineman, a villager who straddles worlds with his appearances on Countdown, but a villager all the same, on Keith last night:

...Barack Obama's attempt to play the presidential contest out on John McCain's terrirtory. John McCain is supposed to be the expert on foreign policy and defense in that part of the world. Barack Obama is coming off like the guy who can see over the horizon, can use his own internal radar. Obama's the one who was saying more than a year ago that Afghanistan was the place to watch, that it was the central place in the war on terror. It was Obama who was pushing the timetable for withdrawal. now both of those seem to be kind of conventional wisdom in many ways backed up to some extent by the very people on the ground Obama is talking to.

The beauty of this message is that it reinforces one of the central themes of Obama's campaign, which is that judgment is more important than experience and as Obama's slam dunk of a trip coincides with even more McCain stumbles (umm, what Iraq-Pakistan border, exactly?) McCain is aiding and abetting the destruction of the only thing he had left in this election. Matt Yglesias summarizes the consequences of Obama's trip to McCain's presidential prospects (h/t TPM):

[McCain had] spent, several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the "progress" in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality.

But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he'd been right all along! That's about as close to "game, set, match" as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign. What's more, given the domestic situation and John McCain's inability to talk about domestic issues persuasively, he can't afford to play for a draw on Iraq.

Or, to put it another way, as a "prominent Republican strategist" expressed it in an e-mail to Marc Ambinder:

"We're fucked."