2008 is not 1988

In that year it was Al Gore who brought up William Horton in a debate with Dukakis, which the GOP then used to great effect (first of all by changing his name to "Willie"). Twenty years later, it was Hillary Clinton who hammered Obama for his pledge to meet with foreign leaders in a debate.

McCain thinks he can use this position of Obama's to score some points, as you can see in the ad above. Of course, the ad was on the Jerusalem Post website, a nice piece of targeted advertising to get money and votes from Jewish voters (esp. in FL). But McCain will emphasize it to larger audiences, no doubt.

But he's wrong, as Dick Morris has said. Obama's comments polled well with Democrats after he made them. The whole point of his answer in the debate was to contrast needed diplomacy to Bush's Texas shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy. Hillary tried to make it into a blunder, but it wasn't really. Contrasting a careful diplomatic style to cowboy diplomacy is a winner for Obama and the Dems. On the one issue that McCain should best Obama on, he's a miserable failure.