Obama to do to McCain what he did to Hillary

The presidential race has been going fast and furious while I've had a blogging respite over the past few weeks. It's been interesting to pay less attention as I have been; this after all is what the vast majority of voters do. Those who pay attention daily are a minority after all. The advantage of paying attention is the ability to predict the future--what will happen when something becomes widely known. (I don't pretend to have a perfect record on this blog--I didn't think there was any way that McCain could win the GOP nod, nor did I think Obama could win--but I did predict Thompson's demise and Huckabee's rise.)

The McCain ad I posted a few days ago has been playing over and over in Ohio, the swing state of all swing states. I find it effective. The McCain team knows exactly its weakness--McCain will be portrayed as a reckless warmonger by the Dems. They also know their strong point--McCain's backstory. Iraq is obviously viewed by McCain's team as vitally important, a point I was complaining has been missed by Republican commentators, including Jay Cost.

There are big problems in the McCain camp. The biggest is this: what Obama did to Hillary, a target the size of a bull's-eye, he's going to do to McCain, a target the size of a barn. "Experience? You talk about your experience? Then why did you vote for the Iraq war?" With Hillary it was just her 2002 Senate vote, with McCain it is everything, his whole worldview. This is why McCain's going down, because his argument for why he should be president is fatally flawed.

Hillary's was flawed too, but not nearly so bad. Hillary, I have said here, would be a stronger general-election candidate based on the electoral math. But Obama is perhaps the stronger candidate when it comes to message. He offers a clear contrast to McCain. Sure, he has a lot of work to do: uniting the party, appealing to Appalachia. But these things he might be able to overcome. The primary campaign made him more able to do it, not less. Hillary would not be able to offer the message of a break with the past like Obama. She'd be a throwback, neutralizing the downfall of McCain's age. She voted for the war, enabling McCain to pull what saved Bush's bacon in '04, viz. repeating over and over that Kerry voted for the war. This was, in terms of message, why Bush won last time. He always had the last word in the debate: "You voted for it, then against it. You're wishy-washy, but I stand firm." It's why Hillary lost because Obama always had the last word on Iraq, pointing to her vote.

But this time around the Democrat will always have the last word. It's an incredible advantage. And it's an advantage that cuts down McCain right at the roots--because foreign policy is his expertise. Or is it?

Philip Giraldi has a stinging indictment of McCain in this month's TAC:

Intelligence analysts who have briefed Sen. John McCain on international issues generally report that he is not very knowledgeable about most parts of the world, despite his years of experience in government and his campaign's insistence that one of his principal strengths is foreign-policy expertise. When speaking with an area specialist or expert, McCain is primarily interested in stating his own perceptions and is not generally regarded as an attentive listener. Analysts do not like briefing him because he becomes angry and sometimes personally offensive when someone contradicts his view. One analyst stated that McCain's alleged expertise on international issues is essentially bogus. He speaks no foreign language, and his international experience drives from brief postings at military bases, junkets while serving as Navy liaison to the Senate, and the misfortune of his rather more extensive state in the Hanoi Hilton.

As a congressman, McCain served on committees dealing with Department of the Interior issues, Indian affairs, and the problems of aging--all areas of particular interest to his Arizona constituents. As a senator, he has served on the three committees dealing with the armed services, Indian affairs, and commerce. He is regarded as an expert on the military, both because of his background and due to an genuine interest. But McCain's only foray into foreign affairs as a senator has been his chairmanship of the International Republican Institute, a controversial quasi-public arm of the Republican Party engaged in democracy promotion overseas. McCain's position with IRI requires him to make an occasional speech on policy, but he has no hands-on role and is not much interested in particular issues. One of the private contributors to IRI is the notorious private mercenary firm Blackwater USA, which donated $15,000 to the group's coffers in 2005 and 2006 and in return received a contract for $18 million to protect IRI workers overseas.

McCain's foreign travel in recent years has been in the security and diplomatic cocoon that has become normal for someone with a senator's status. His comments during and after visits to Iraq have been lampooned in the media for being completely disconnected from the situation on the ground. Like George W. Bush, McCain has not been inclined to vacation outside the United States, and he appears to have little curiosity about the world and its peoples. According to the analysts who have interacted with McCain, his recent misstatements about various Muslim groups and other foreign-policy issues are not slips. They reflect a real lack of interest in other countries that makes it impossible for him to empathize with their problems, leading to a monochromatic view of the world and the facile assumption that it is always better to solve issues dealing with foreigners by dropping bombs.

McCain, whose foreign-policy advisers are exclusively neocons, receives regular briefings from the distinguished scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, which are presumably more to his taste than the less colorful information provided by the $42 billion per year intelligence community.