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In recent days the press has clearly noted one major misunderstanding John McCain has regarding the “surge” – his mistaken belief that it made possible alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq when those arrangements actually preceded the surge by some time.
But in the same period McCain expressed an even more profoundly and shockingly mistaken notion — that we have now actually achieved “success” in Iraq.
In a July 22nd town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain said:

“We have succeeded. Sadr city is safe. Basra is safe. Mosul is safe. The people of Iraq are now leading normal lives.”

This is an absolutely extraordinary claim. In fact, it could very easily be dismissed as just another of McCain’s increasingly frequent “gaffes” or “blunders” except that it has actually become a critical pillar of the basic Republican “party line” – one that is particularly emphasized by the Wall Street Journal and other Rupert Murdoch-owned media.
Until a few weeks ago the standard way this was expressed was that the US was “on the verge of” success or victory. In the last 10 days, however, the rhetoric has actually been ratcheted up to an even higher level. In a major Wall Street Journal op-ed commentary on July 16th – one titled “The New Reality in Iraq” — Fredrick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keane, all major military analysts, made the following quite breathtaking assertion:

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended.

They then elaborated:

The fighters have not simply hidden their weapons and gone to ground to await the next opportunity to kill each other. The Sunni insurgency, as well as AQI, has been severely disrupted. Coalition and Iraqi forces have killed or detained many key leaders, driven the militants out of every one of Iraq’s major cities (including Mosul), and are pursuing the remnants vigorously in rural areas and the desert..The Shiite militias have also been broken apart, sending thousands of their leaders scurrying for safety in Iran.

This conclusion was echoed in a July 18th editorial in a the New York Sun:

“A fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack… [But] the Iraq war is over. We won.”

These are remarkably bold assertions. Yet only three days earlier one of the three authors of the Wall Street Journal piece – Kimberly Kagan – wrote a commentary that was also published in the Wall Street Journal. Titled “Moving Forward in Iraq,” it presented a radically different picture.

[Since June 15th] Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno have encircled Baghdad with a double cordon of U.S. and Iraqi forces… U.S. forces have begun blocking major road, river, and transportation routes around Baghdad. They are also deployed in critical neighborhoods around the outskirts and the interior of the city…
“Phantom Thunder” is the largest operation in Iraq since 2003, and a milestone in the counterinsurgency strategy. For the first time, U.S. forces are working systematically throughout central Iraq to secure Baghdad by clearing its rural “belts” and its interior, so that the enemy cannot move from one safe haven to another.

This hardly seems compatible with McCain’s assertion that “success” has already been achieved, that the major cities are at peace or, in fact, with the assertions Kagan herself makes in the article she co-authored or at least co-signed three days later. The US military leadership would hardly be launching the largest military operation since the invasion if all of the most important objectives of the surge had already been accomplished
The notion that the surge has successfully produced something resembling “normal life” becomes even more grotesque when one reviews the on-the-scene descriptions of conditions within Baghdad itself. In an article entitled “Baghdad’s Walls Keep Peace but Feel like Prison,” AP writer Hamza Hendawi describes conditions as follows:

Read more…

Buried in a sloppy, whiny column today by Bill Kristol was a fairly interesting proposition:

In 1948, a Republican Congress, which had taken power two years before with great expectations after a decade and a half of Demoratic control, had become unpopular. Harry Truman lambasted it as a no-good, do-nothing Congress — and he rode that assault to the White House. We’ll soon start hearing more from McCain about the deficiencies of today’s surge-opposing, drilling-blocking, earmark-loving Congress.
And McCain will then assert that if you don’t like the Congress in which Senator Obama serves in the majority right now, you really should be alarmed about a President Obama rubber-stamping the deeds of a Democratic Congress next year.

Now I understand that Congress’ steadily plummeting approval ratings this year have been a source of endless consolation to Republicans. But the idea that excessive liberal activism on the part of Democrats in Congress (the planted axiom of Kristol’s argument) is a big reason for public discontent has significantly less evidence to support it than the dubious belief of some progressives that the failure to cut off war funding, block FISA, or impeach Bush, is the problem. And if, conversely, McCain does indeed take the “do-nothing Congress” tack, he’s going to have to deal with the fact that offshore oil drilling and the surge are considerably less popular than, say, expanding children’s health care and providing housing relief, which McCain has helped obstruct.
Kristol’s other implicit argument is that McCain can batten on the alleged desire of voters to position a Republican president to “restrain” a Democratic Congress. I’ve never much bought the concept that Americans love partisan gridlock and split tickets to achieve it. And with ticket-splitting down significantly in recent years, it’s unlikely to be the dominant feature in this general election. Moreover, there have been exactly two presidential campaigns in living memory where a candidate overtly and successfully appealed to voters to “counter-balance” Congress: Truman in 1948, of course, and Clinton in 1996. And to emulate either of these examples, McCain would have to make up his mind (as Kristol clearly has not made up his own) whether to charge Congress with trying to do too much or too little.
And there’s the rub: Congress’ abysmal approval rating are something of a statistical anomaly, produced by Democratic unhappiness with too little progress against Bush, Republicans unhappy with Democratic control, and many weak partisans and independents simply registering unhappiness with “Washington” and with the general direction of the country. With Democrats almost certain to increase their margins in both Houses, it’s hard to imagine why the same voters determining that result would be excited about canceling its effect by voting for a presidential candidate promising to deadlock Congress even more than Bush has, or to move it back towards its pre-2006 direction.
On top of everything else, of course, John McCain has served continuously in Congress for a quarter-century, and is trying to paint Barack Obama as insufficiently experienced to serve as president. Overall, the strategy that Kristol is both urging and predicting would at a minimum require a candidate and a campaign far more sure-footed than anything we’ve seen from Team McCain. I doubt these plodding checkers players will become chess masters overnight, particularly with a smart and tough opponent like Obama.

Here, from Politico’s David Paul Kuhn, is an interesting nugget based on the recent Pew Hispanic Center survey of the presidential race:

McCain’s problem looks to be most pronounced among Protestant Latinos, who had seemed to be the GOP’s doorway into the Hispanic population. From 2000 to 2004, Protestant Latinos increased their share of the total Hispanic electorate from 25 percent to 32 percent, in large part because of Bush’s evangelical outreach and strategic microtargeting of the community. Even as turnout increased, support for Bush among the group rose from 44 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2004.
The Pew poll, however, shows that only a third of Protestant or Evangelical Hispanics intend to vote for McCain, while 59 percent support Obama — who also enjoys a 50-percentage-point lead among Catholic Latinos, long a solid bloc of the Democratic coalition.

You have to wonder if this poor showing by McCain among one of the truly critical swing voter groups will have an effect on the remainder of his general election campaign, including his veep choice. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight notes today that Mitt Romney appears terribly weak among Hispanic voters, probably thanks to his efforts to pose as a tough guy on immigration during the nominating contest.

Frank Rich has a gem of a column in the Sunday New York Times, “How Obama Became Acting President.” Rich shows why he is one of the better hires the ‘newspaper of record’ has yet made. He explains the politics of the moment with perceptive observations, among them:

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

After watching a replay of Senator Obama’s Berlin speech (See it here), I wondered “what’s this, an American politician being cheered in Europe? Haven’t seen that for a few decades” Rich nailed the historical meaning more succinctly:

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

In stark contrast, Rich illuminates McCain’s ill-fated plan to visit an offshore oil-rig:

The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.

Rich’s column goes on to evoke a palpable sense of dread about what a McCain presidency would feel like, and a tantalizing taste of the alternative. Real pride in our President? What a radical concept.

If there’s a siller right-wing preoccupation today than the WSJ column extolling George “Batman” Bush (see staff post below), it would have to be the reported efforts of conservative “investigators” to uncover Barack Obama’s senior thesis from Columbia University. Seems he doesn’t have a copy, and his professor doesn’t have a copy (hardly shocking since it was 25 years ago, and believe it or not, in a less documented pre-Internet era), and though everyone remembers it had something to do with nuclear proliferation, certain bloodhounds are apparently convinced it could include politically damaging material.
Well, whatever. But I was amused by the innocent puzzlement of Noam Scheiber at TNR over Obama’s spotty memories of his college work:

For what it’s worth, I also had a semi-strange experience involving the Obama thesis back in February. An aide happened to mention that Obama had written his thesis on nuclear deterrence. When I went back to verify it in a subsequent conversation, the aide told me he’d have to double-check. He subsequently e-mailed to say Obama couldn’t remember whether it was his actual thesis or just a paper for a class, so it was probably best to drop the reference altogether. It wasn’t a particularly big deal either way–just a minor detail in the context of a much larger piece–but it did leave me scratching my head a bit. I mean, who doesn’t remember their senior thesis?

I’m not sure exactly how old Noam is, but I suspect his senior thesis was written a lot more recently than Obama’s, while my own Emory senior thesis was submitted (and was promptly destroyed, more than likely) much earlier than either. And all I really remember with any specificity is that I decided I had to reinterpret the history of Western Thought at least back to the Nominalists and Realists in order to explain the prose works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even today, I cringe with embarassment every time I hear a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I realize we’re all supposed to be endlessly curious about every detail of the lives of candidates for president, and also recall the odd “joke” by the Clinton campaign earlier this year suggesting that a perusal of Obama’s elementary school scribblings showed a lifelong lust for high office. But if Obama’s senior thesis didn’t make it into the extensive self-revelations he’s offered in two books, then it probably wasn’t worth remembing.
John McCain has basically said he didn’t grow up until the crucible of his experience in Vietnam, when he was over 30, and George W. Bush famously referred to the foibles of his drinking days as a matter of being “young and irresponsible,” though he didn’t dump his buddy Jack Daniels until he was 40. So let’s give that 22-year-old scholar Barack Obama a break.

If you enjoy the journalistic genre of unintentional self-parody, there’s a true classic available in today’s Wall Street Journal: an op-ed by right-wing thriller author Andrew Klavan arguing that the new box office smash Batman movie, “The Dark Knight,” is actually “at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” Why?

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Klavan goes on at considerable, turgid length in this vein. Read Michael Cohen’s account if your heart can’t stand the belly-laughs associated with ploughing through the original. But I’m sure the Batman movie’s producers are happy they’ve raked in so much money before moviegoers realized they were participating in a referendum on the Bush administration with every popcorn purchase.

Last month, we published an authoritative table-setting article about the Hispanic vote and the 2008 presidential election by R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, that concluded the Democratic ticket needed to hold Republican support among Hispanics at or below about 35%.
It’s good to know from a new Pew Hispanic Center survey that Barack Obama is currently leading John McCain among Hispanics by a 66%-23% margin. The widespread fear that Hillary Clinton’s Hispanic supporters might defect to McCain in significant numbers also seems to be abating:

[M]ore than three-quarters of Latinos who reported that they voted for Clinton in the primaries now say they are inclined to vote for Obama in the fall election, while just 8% say they are inclined to vote for McCain. That means that Obama is doing better among Hispanics who supported Clinton than he is among non-Hispanic white Clinton supporters, 70% of whom now say they have transferred their allegiance to Obama while 18% say they plan to vote for McCain, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Moreover, the pro-Obama trends among Hispanics is being strongly reinforced by a pro-Democratic shift in party preferences:

In addition to their strong support for Obama, Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-GOP tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade. Some 65% of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with just 26% who identify with or lean toward the GOP. This 39 percentage point Democratic Party identification edge is larger than it has been at any time this decade; as recently as 2006, the partisan gap was just 21 percentage points.

All these findings are obviously a snapshot rather than a portrait of Hispanic political dynamics. But they are an encouraging sign.

Well, Barack Obama’s delivered his much-awaited speech in Berlin, to a crowd of about 200,000, many of whom were waving, not burning, American flags.
You can see the video and read the transcript, here.
Reactions are slow to trickle in, but outside Republican ranks, look to be very positive. It appears (as Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post seems to suggest at length) that Obama took a complicated and inherently risky situation and navigated it well. It was a huge crowd, but Obama did little to whip it into a frenzy. He alluded frequently to big changes in U.S. policy, but did that lightly, and coupled it with direct challenges to Europeans on issues ranging from Iran to Darfur to Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, and to anti-Americanism itself. The whole speech echoed his basic campaign thematics, but sounded relevant to the site and the occasion. And by tying the whole speech to the Berlin Airlift of sixty years ago, Obama kept the audience focused on the absolute high point in post-World War II U.S.-German relations.
It didn’t hurt, either, that Obama worked in very explicit references to his love for America.
We’ll see as it plays out, but early indications are quite good.

There’s a delightful article up at The New Republic by Alaska-based writer Charles Wohlforth about the startling effect the Obama campaign is having on Democratic morale and participation in his state.
Obama’s efforts in the state are extraordinary, to put it mildly:

We’re so used to losing at the top of the ticket that we think about the presidential nominee mainly in the context of how Republicans can use him to shoot down our state candidates–as they did to torpedo former Governor Tony Knowles’s run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, with an ad that showed his head floating next to John Kerry’s. As Knowles said, “Hanging the national Democratic label on somebody was worth 4 or 5 points right there.”
So, how could it be that a Democratic presidential candidate was opening field offices all over our state, hiring a staff similar in size to the largest in-state campaigns, and going on the air with TV commercials in June?

Wohlforth is appropriately skeptical about talk that Obama could actually win Alaska, but says there’s no doubt that the campaign’s effort there (building on a foundation first set by Howard Dean’s commitment of money for state party staff as part of his Fifty States Strategy) is having a tremendous positive impact on down-ballot prospects, especially the even-money challenges to incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young. It doesn’t hurt that Alaska Democrats are already on the upswing thanks to a massive corruption scandal that’s split the long-dominant GOP.

Democrats, even national ones, look a whole lot better in this light–and Obama has already benefitted. The first sign that he had tapped into something fundamental here was the Super Tuesday caucuses. I’ve caucused before. It’s been an irrelevant and slightly absurd affair. One year, too few people from my district showed up to fill our party officer positions. In 1988, Alaska’s Democratic caucuses chose Jesse Jackson while the Republicans picked Pat Robertson.
This year, I couldn’t get to the caucus site because the entire east side of Anchorage was suffering from massive gridlock. People abandoned their cars in below-zero darkness and walked miles to the site. Organizers at voter registration desks finally gave up and began waving people in. Similar stories–such as a fire marshal who closed down an overcrowded caucus in the conservative Mat-Su area–came in from 41 locations across the state, including sites where Democrats from tiny Alaska Native villages attended by telephone or Internet. The turnout was at least 12 times higher than the previous record.

Being from conservative Georgia, I can relate to a lot of Wohlforth’s experience. In 1972, as a college student, I was Democratic precinct chairman in an Atlanta suburb, and spent election night in shock, as Nixon carried the county 4-1, sweeping all sorts of fools and knaves into local offices. This was the third straight shellacking for Democratic presidential candidates in Georgia. Four years later, with Jimmy Carter running for president, most of the fools and knaves were swept right back out, as Carter won the county, the state and the White House. Just being competitive had a tremendous effect on morale and interest levels among Democrats.
It’s possible that in retrospect the Obama campaign’s devotion of resources to places like Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and for that matter, Georgia, will look foolish, if he winds up locked in a photo finish race where the outcome revolves around Ohio, just as it did four years ago. But that won’t matter much to the red-state beneficiaries of the Dean/Obama Fifty State Strategy, who may well look back on this year as a big turning point that vindicated their years of work in the wilderness.

Senator Obama leads Senator McCain among women by 9 points in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, conducted 7/18-21 (click on “data drilldown” pop-up). It should be a lot more, according to Kate Sheppard’s don’t-miss In These Times cover story “McSexist: John McCain’s War on Women.” Sheppard does a good job of pulling together the case against McCain for women voters, and her article should be helpful in encouraging women to vote their interests. Here’s three key graphs:

A February Planned Parenthood poll of 1,205 women voters in 16 battleground states found that 50 percent of women voters don’t know McCain’s position on abortion, and that 49 percent of women who backed McCain were pro-choice. Forty-six percent of women supporting McCain said they’d like to see Roe v. Wade upheld — though McCain says he supports overturning the decision. When they learned of his position on Roe, 36 percent of women who identified as both pro-choice and likely McCain voters said they would be less likely to vote for him.
These moderate, often suburban, middle-class women could be critical swing voters this election. At the time of the Planned Parenthood poll, Obama held only a 5 percentage-point margin over McCain with its swing-state demographic, 41 percent to 36 percent.
Planned Parenthood concludes that these findings suggest “that just filling in McCain’s actual voting record and his publicly stated positions on a handful of key issues has the potential to diminish his total vote share among battleground women voters by about 17 to 20 percentage points.”

Sheppard goes on to reveal McCain flip-flopping like a mullett on meth regarding issues of concern to women. Indeed, his political Achilles’ Heel may prove to be his dismal record on women’s concerns — provided Dems do a good job of publicizing it.
And the key to increasing Obama’s edge among women in general may be targeting unmarried women in particular, as a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner survey conducted for Womens’ Voices 6/19-24 concluded:

…in key battleground states — Obama holds a 32-point lead over McCain (61%-29%) among this demographic. By comparison, another recent Greenberg/Democracy Corps survey has him leading McCain among married by just one point (49%-48%).
…Per Census data, there are 53 million unmarried women in this country — which is almost equal to the number of married women, both representing 26% of the voting-age population. In fact, Page Gardner, president of Women’s Voices, Women Vote Action Fund, says that unmarried women represent the nation’s fastest-growing demographic. “It is huge and it’s growing,” she told First Read. “This is an extremely important demographic.”
One of the poll’s conclusions is that increasing the size of the unmarried women’s vote — from 22% of all voters in 2004 to 24% in 2008 — could result in at least a two-point increase in Obama’s total, “a huge gain in presidential politics.”
But turning out unmarried women to vote hasn’t always been easy. In 2004, according to the polling analysis, 41% of unmarried women DIDN’T vote in 2004, versus 29% of married women who didn’t.

Targeting and mobilizing this demographic for a record-level turnout is a difficult challenge. But meeting it could open the door for a Democratic landslide.