CAMPAIGN
OUTSIDER McCain: Straight to his blind
spot By Muhammad Cohen
HONG KONG - John McCain's victory in the
Florida primary solidifies his status as
frontrunner for the Republican presidential
nomination. The pundits may wonder what Republican
voters really want, but there's no doubt about
what straight talker McCain wants on the Iraq
front.
McCain defeated Mitt Romney,
ex-governor of liberal Massachusetts who now casts
himself as the true conservative, and former New
York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who hoped Florida could
jumpstart his national political profile the way
September 11, 2001, boosted his business
portfolio.
Giuliani and his team made the
very reasonable political
calculation to skip the small,
unrepresentative states of Iowa, New Hampshire and
South Carolina that voted earlier in January.
Instead, they'd begin in Florida, the
fourth-largest state in the US. Florida's 16
million people include elements of both the black
and white deep south, transplanted northeast
liberals, Cuban immigrants, and military families.
But Giuliani's calculations didn't
accurately tabulate the impact of this
extraordinarily long election cycle that began
more than two years ahead of the presidential
vote, and concentrated extraordinary attention on
those first states. As they say in Giuliani's
hometown (and mine), "You gotta be in it to win
it." Since Giuliani wasn't in it for Iowa and New
Hampshire, his early lead in the national polls
dissipated before Florida rolled around.
'Unstoppable' Pundits will parse
the numbers to find scant support for McCain in
the Republican Party's conservative base, hoping
to extend suspense over the nominee and maintain
their ratings. Campaign aides contend Florida
gives McCain "unstoppable" momentum going into
next week's Super Tuesday multi-state scramble.
Over the coming months, this column will present
the presidential race as seen from overseas, where
it's often easier to see the forest without all
those trees in the way.
What McCain does
have, and what voters desperately desire after
eight years of the George W Bush-Dick Cheney
dissembling derby, is trust. The Arizona senator
portrays himself as the straight-talker who
doesn't always tell people what they want to hear.
That's an especially stark contrast with political
chameleon Romney, a leveraged buyout specialist,
and son of an auto company chief executive officer
turned state governor who portrays himself as a
friend of the working man.
Yet McCain put
that straight-talking reputation at risk to try to
draw a mythical distinction between himself and
Romney on an issue that McCain cares about more
than most voters. In the final days leading to the
Florida vote, McCain accused Romney of favoring a
timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq. That may be
a reasonable position in any setting except a
Republican primary. It's certainly a US campaign
moment meant to play better in Peoria - or, in
Florida's case, Pensacola - than in Paris or
Peshawar.
Torture again McCain's source for the charge is a tortured
reading of an interview Romney gave last April, in
which he urged Bush to press the Iraqi government
on "a series of timetables and milestones" for
political and military progress. Those agreements,
Romney stressed, would remain secret between US
and Iraqi leaders, in contrast to the Democrats'
push last year for placing a withdrawal timetable
in war-funding legislation.
Nevertheless,
Romney's statement aligned him with the Democrats
"waving the white flag" in Iraq, according to
McCain. When Romney demanded an apology for
distorting his position, McCain, self-styled
father of the "surge" strategy that put more than
20,000 additional US troops (and millions more
Iraqis) in harm's way, countered, "I think the
apology is owed to the young men and women who are
serving this nation in uniform that we will not
let them down in hard times or good."
McCain has many admirable qualities that
make him a formidable candidate, particularly in
the general election with this appeal to
moderates. But he has a blind spot on Iraq. McCain
is not just a former navy flier and prisoner of
war in Hanoi: he's the son and grandson of
admirals. His father, John McCain Jr, commanded
all US Pacific forces during America's deepest
involvement in Vietnam.
McCain fils
believed then, and still does, that if the
politicians had let him and his dad and his fellow
pilots bomb the right targets in North Vietnam,
the war could have been won. As a prisoner of war
from 1967 until March 1973, McCain missed the
American public's education about the war and the
massive movement that grew to oppose it. For the
past 35 years, he's also missed the key lesson,
one that applies equally to the Iraq Bush broke:
there is no military solution - especially for
outsiders - to a political war.
Winning
the war vote Democrats take note: the
McCain-Romney Florida squabble previews how
Republicans will frame Iraq in the general
election, and why Democrats can't assume the issue
will cut their way in November, even though the
public overwhelming opposes war.
Forget
that the war in Iraq is the biggest US
foreign-policy mistake since Vietnam. Forget the
post-September 11 global goodwill squandered in
this adventure that had nothing to do with
al-Qaeda or those attacks. Forget the intelligence
failure regarding those phantom weapons of mass
destruction said to be in Saddam Hussein's
clutches. Forget the mass fraud the Bush people
foisted on the American public and public
officials to authorize this war. (Bush's warm
reception from both sides of the aisle during his
state of union speech Monday night shows the
defrauded don't mind; none of them paid a price
for their mistakes.)
This is America 2008,
where you don't talk about failure. The Bush
administration's abject failure to prevent the
September 11 attacks - imagine the Republican
shrieking if al-Qaeda had struck the homeland
under a Democratic president - or bring any of the
principals to justice has morphed into its success
preventing another attack on US soil for more than
six years. Never mind that 10 times as many
Americans (and counting) have died in Iraq than in
the September 11 attacks.
Iraq is now
about winning - the "surge" is working. The
Republicans, especially "surge"-master McCain,
want to continue this winning strategy. The
Democrats favor withdrawal and defeat. Voter,
which do you chose, victory or defeat for America?
That seems ridiculously simplistic. The
"surge" may be working, but toward what end?
McCain says he's willing to keep US troops in Iraq
for 50 years; with the Iraqi government's slow
pace of taking responsibility, American troops are
on track to remain for generations. Is that
continued presence in Iraq in the best interests
of the US?
Oh, please, voters lament,
you're giving us a headache with all these
questions. Keep it simple. The genius of the
Republican revolution, begun under Ronald Reagan
and honed ever more sharply since, is to pose
simple questions to voters and agree with their
answers. Do you want higher taxes or lower taxes?
Do you want more choices for your (ask separately)
education/health care/retirement
investments/expressions of faith, or do you want
government bureaucrats/Teddy Kennedy/Jesse
Jackson/Hillary Clinton putting more shackles on
your freedom?
In the autumn, the voters
will face this simple, life-or-death (for someone
else) question: Do you want victory in Iraq or
defeat? John McCain, putative Republican nominee
after his Florida primary victory, points to a
simple answer.
Former broadcast news
producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s
story to the world as a US Information Agency
diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air
(www.hongkongonair.com), a
novel set during the 1997 handover about
television news, love, betrayal, high finance and
cheap lingerie.
(Copyright 2008 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
