Has McCain Finally Taken the Gloves Off?
It seems that John McCain may finally be abandoning his “take it easy on Barack” approach to campaigning that was allowing the Democrat to walk all over him without getting much of an in kind response.
Lately, McCain has sharpened his attacks on Obama, using both ridicule and good old fashioned political punches to land some body blows on the messiah. His best line to date is his claim that Obama “would rather lose a war and win an election.” You know you’ve hit paydirt when even the pro-Obama press whined about that one.
But it is McCain’s critique of Obama’s judgment on the surge that his campaign thinks will cut deeply into the notion of Obama’s inevitability. Many pro-Obama analysts are already dismissing this tactic saying that Prime Minister Maliki’s seeming acceptance of Obama’s timeline is the ballgame.
McCain hasn’t helped much by muffing the Iraq timeline a bit, saying the surge was responsible for the “Awakening” militias the sprouted up in the Sunni community to fight al-Qaeda. The surge may have given a nice psychological boost to those efforts but they clearly started before the surge was even announced.
Nevertheless, I think if McCain continues to hammer on the points he made yesterday in Denver speaking before an audience of veterans - that Obama was not only dead wrong about the surge but has now cynically come around to the view that it worked - he has a real chance to get people to start asking questions about Obama’s inexperience and lack of judgment:
Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn’t just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.
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In order for this strategy to work, McCain has to hammer on this theme daily for the next few weeks. He has to coordinate the strategy with surrogates. He has to spend some bucks on advertising in key states. He has to force Obama to address the discrepancy between his words then and his words now - force him to say he was wrong.A tall order that. But a rewarding strategy if he can make it work.
A small step, but in the right direction. Now, if he can correct his wrong stance on global warming and cap and trade, and win over his conservative base, he might be a decent candidate.
