My little politics blog

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

If there is an unfair supposition at work here, there is a simple way to find out. Someone should ask McCain how long he's willing to have us stay in Iraq even if we are sustaining casualties. Since he believes it is in our strategic interests to stay there on a permanent basis I doubt very much he'll say that in that case he'd only be comfortable staying two or five or some other relatively short span of years. That is because he believes we should stay there on a permanent basis, ideally with no casualties but with casualties if that's what it takes. The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg put it all quite elegantly back in January just after McCain started saying this. "McCain," he wrote, "wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal--that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay."

Hmm, I dunno. The main problem seems to be that the ad (falsely) implies that Obama was right there when Wright did the whole "God damn America" thing. So that could hurt.

What I'm not sure of is how it might hamstring Obama, in terms of responding or not. He already thoroughly responded to the Wright thing, but what we keep finding out is that a lot of voters don't pay close attention to things until a couple of weeks before their own primary. So will he have to respond all over again? Just make some sort of ad where he quotes himself? How off-message will this take him? Etc.

Snicker.

I wonder sometimes about that "I'm very comfortable in the kitchen" line. It's inviting a sexist response.

[John Edwards] On Clinton: "I like something different about Hillary. I think her tenacity shows a real strength that's inside her."

What doesn't he like about Clinton? "Um, still a lot of the old politics," John Edwards said.

As for Obama, he says: "Sometimes I want to see more substance under the rhetoric."

But he cited two things he likes about the charismatic young senator from Illinois: "One is, I think he really does want to bring about serious change and a different way of doing things. And secondly, I think it's a great symbolic thing to have an African-American who could be president."

At that, Mrs. Edwards rolled her eyes and, gripping the arms of her kitchen chair with some exaggeration, seemed about to lunge from her seat. "What about the great symbolic thing about a woman ..."

"It's important. It's important," her husband said. "I know it."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had just declared victory in the Nevada caucuses when most campaign reporters heard Jeffrey Berman's voice for the first and only time.

Berman, Sen. Barack Obama's director of delegate selection, chimed in during a conference call with the media to make an unexpected case: Despite Clinton's popular vote victory in Nevada and an authoritative Associated Press count giving Clinton the edge in the Nevada delegate count, Obama had actually won the state by the only measure that mattered.

"Obama had a majority in the district that had an odd number of delegates, so he won an extra seat," Berman told the puzzled press; the Associated Press delegate expert, on the call, promised to revise his count.

Obama's Nevada delegate victory was widely viewed at the time as a curiosity, an asterisk to Clinton's win. But in February, as Obama amassed delegates despite losing big states, the shape of the race became clear: The name of the game was delegates.

It was the game Berman and a friend, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, had been playing all along. And as Clinton's staff scrambled after Super Tuesday to remake her strategy to meet that reality, it began to become clear that Berman had helped build Obama a lead too big to surmount.

"He is the unsung hero of the Obama effort," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant who supports Clinton.

The bearded, no-profile 50-year-old lawyer's central role in Obama's likely nomination is emblematic of the depth of Obama's preparation for the 2008 campaign.

The delegate counter, for his part, declined to comment for this article, beyond providing bare biographical details.

"I've got ten things on my plate and I'm still trying to win this [a choice expletive] thing," he wrote in an e-mail, referring questions to Obama's press secretary.

Bill Clinton today made an expanded and direct argument for seating Florida and Michigan delegates, suggesting his wife is being punished and arguing that Obama's campaign opposed a re-vote.

"I never thought it would be the Democratic Party that didn't want to count votes in Florida," he said at a rally at the University of Montana. "I thought that was a Republican strategy -- or strategery as the case may be. And I just ask you all this, do you really believe Florida would be getting this kind of treatment if the vote had turned out the other way?"

Eventually, we cut our ties to Savimbi. When the apartheid government in South Africa fell, removing his other source of funding, he turned to blood diamonds to finance his endless war. Early on, he had claimed to be a democrat, and some conservatives believed him. In 1992, when he lost the election he claimed to have wanted all these years, he just started fighting again. The war went on for ten more years, until his death. When word got out that he had been killed,

"Residents of Angola's dilapidated capital, Luanda, greeted it with jubilation. People honked their horns as they drove through the rutted streets while others danced and fired shots in the air."

They were cheering for the end of twenty seven years of war: a war that would have been far less lethal without American support. That was what Charlie Black was lobbying for: the support Savimbi needed to utterly destroy his country. Thanks to Black's skill as a lobbyist, and his apparent lack of a conscience, Savimbi got it.

This is John McCain's chief political advisor. Think about it.

For a candidate who likes to complain that quoting him accurately constitutes out-of-context foul play, John McCain sure does love distorting things Barack Obama has said. For example, Obama says "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us." This, it seems to me, is indisputably true. But in the Land of Straight Talk where you lie constantly, McCain says "The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny" and that Obama calling it tiny "betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment." But of course they're only even disagreeing here at all if you leave out the part where Obama said Iran is tiny compared to the Soviet Union.

Similarly, it turns out that if you take a joke Barack Obama was making about duck hunting, and then change it around so that you have him saying that you hunt ducks with a six shooter, you can make a nice joke about how Obama thinks you hunt ducks with a six shooter. The one small problem in this narrative, of course, is that Obama never said you hunt ducks with a six shooter which makes a stump speech line about how he did say that pretty dishonest.