Just Above Sunset

Sometimes technology is merciful. Saturday, May 31, the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee met in Washington to decide what to do with the unsanctioned primaries in Florida and Michigan – and the cable news channels were covering it wall to wall. Was that worth watching? Would Hillary Clinton have her way and get the delegates from the primaries she agreed wouldn’t count? There seems to be a lot of shouting – some very angry Clinton folks, and there was endless speculation from the talking heads. 

Then, mercifully, here in Hollywood, the cable went out again – hours of silence, nothing at all, until things came up again as the sun was setting.

Well, there seems to have been an agreement:

Democratic Party leaders agreed Saturday to seat Michigan and Florida delegates with half votes into this summer’s convention with a compromise that left Barack Obama on the verge of the nomination but riled Hillary Rodham Clinton backers who threatened to fight to the August convention.

“Hijacking four delegates is not a good way to start down the path of party unity,” said adviser Harold Ickes.

Clinton’s camp maintains she was entitled to four additional Michigan delegates.

The decision by the party’s Rules Committee raised slightly the total delegates Obama needs to clinch the nomination. Clinton advisers conceded privately he will likely hit the magic number after the final primaries are held Tuesday night, but said the ruling threatened to dash any hopes of a unified party.

“Mrs. Clinton has told me to reserve her right to take this to the Credentials Committee” at the convention, said Ickes, who is a member of the Rules Committee that voted Saturday.

Compromises make no one happy. And the signal is that this is by no means over - as they say, it’s not over until that fat lady sings, and neither camp can seem to find that hypothetical fat lady. But she is rehearsing The Ride of the Valkyries (Walkürenritt) somewhere or other, as that seems appropriate. It was used in Apocalypse Now, after all.

So the new number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination to 2,118, and Obama needs 66 delegates now, and doesn’t seem worried - “There were compromises. … I’m glad the DNC worked it through and I hope we can start focusing on substance as opposed to process.”

But it seems this didn’t go well:

“How can you call yourselves Democrats if you don’t count the vote?” one of the many hecklers in the audience yelled loudly and repeatedly before being escorted out by security. “This is not the Democratic Party!”

Clinton and her supporters wanted the Michigan and Florida delegations fully restored, according to January primaries that she won, but those were not recognized by the party because they were held too early, and both candidates had agreed at the time they would not count. She had been arguing that the votes of the more than two million people who participated in those elections must be recognized, and Obama supporters argued that they did compromise by allowing her to take the majority of delegates in two contests where he didn’t campaign, and anyway, and Obama’s name was not even on the ballot in Michigan. Her folks argued that that was his problem, not hers - he shouldn’t get any pledged delegates in Michigan since he chose not to put his name on the ballot, and she should get her 73 pledged delegates with 55 totally uncommitted. Obama’s team said that the only fair solution was to split the pledged delegates in half - 64 each. The committee agreed on a compromise - she’d get 69 delegates and Obama 59, and that was that. Each delegate would get half a vote at the convention, according to the deal, and that was the punishment for breaking the rules and holding the vote too early.

In short - she lost. And she lost ugly:

Allan Katz, a Rules Committee member and Obama supporter, said the Obama campaign had enough votes on the committee to support the campaign’s proposal to split the delegates 50-50 in Michigan. Ultimately, the campaign agreed instead to support the compromise negotiated by the Michigan Democratic Party as a way to resolve the matter.

“The ironic thing is Obama had the majority of that committee,” Katz said. “The Obama campaign wants to move on and compromise. We did not muscle our way through it. It was a wise decision from a well run and wise campaign that will reverberate.”

Say things like that and people get angry:

“We just blew the election!” a woman in the audience shouted. The crowd was divided between cheering Obama supporters and booing Clinton supporters.

“This isn’t unity! Count all the votes!” another audience member yelled.

Jim Roosevelt, co-chair of the committee, tried repeatedly to gavel it to order. “You are dishonoring your candidate when you disrupt the speakers,” he chided.

And it is not over:

There are three primaries left in the contest - Puerto Rico on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday. Obama should get at least 30 delegates in the remaining primaries, meaning he has to pick up no more than about 30 more superdelegates even if he loses Puerto Rico and South Dakota.

He will not clinch the nomination this weekend, barring a barrage of superdelegates Sunday.

And it really was nasty:

Proponents of full seating continuously interrupted the committee members as they explained their support of the compromise, then supporters of the deal shouted back.

Shut up!” one woman shouted at another.

“You shut up!” the second woman shouted back.

And there was this:

Tina Flournoy, who led Clinton’s efforts to seat both states’ delegations with full voting power, said she was disappointed by the outcome but knew the Clinton position had “no chance” of passing the committee.

Alice Huffman, a Clinton supporter on the committee, explained that the compromise giving delegates half votes was the next best thing to full seating.

“We will leave here more united than we came,” she said.

Some audience members heckled her in response. “Lipstick on a pig!” one shouted.

See House Speaker Pelosi:

The American people have to know the Democratic Party can run its own delegate selection process … if they want to govern America.

See Andrew Sullivan:

We’re discovering for the umpteenth time that the Democrats obviously can’t govern themselves. This absurd circus in DC today really does remind me of their inability to understand rules, and congenital refusal to apply them.

Neil Sinhababu at the Washington Monthly argues the other way. Things went just fine:

But when Michigan and Florida jumped into January, the DNC had to enforce their rules or risk seeing the primary calendar collapse. So they penalized these states, and none of the candidates protested. As bad as it is for people in Michigan and Florida to not have their votes counted, this is the kind of punishment that has to be built into the process for it to make any sense. Without these constraints, there’s no telling what kind of crazy things state party bosses might do with their primaries. The DNC has to act to preserve the integrity of the process.

Lots of people have written about how it’s ridiculous for Hillary Clinton to accept the DNC’s decision back in January, and only complain about them now that it’s to her advantage. My point here isn’t that — if anything, it’s a more controversial one. Howard Dean and the DNC made the right decision back then, and they’ll be right to enforce their rules now.

But Eve Fairbanks was there, on the ground, or at least out on the street:

Howard Dean may hope that the “healing will begin today,” but two blocks away from the northwest Washington Marriott where the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is meeting right now to try to figure out Florida and Michigan, the Hillary protesters are occupying an utterly alternate (and healing-free) universe: a universe in which one of the big lawn rally’s speakers yells that the Democratic Party no longer is in the business of “promoting equality and fairness for all”; in which a Hillary supporter with two poodles shouts, “Howard Dean is a leftist freak!”; in which a man exhibits a sign that reads “At least slaves were counted as 3/5ths a Citizen” and shows Dean whipping handcuffed people; and in which Larry Sinclair, the Minnesota man who took to YouTube to allege that Barack Obama had oral sex with him in the back of a limousine in 1999, is one of the belles of the ball.

“They almost made me cry this morning when they told me to get out of there,” the blond Sinclair - who’s looking roly-poly and giddy in a blue-and-white striped shirt with a pack of Marlboros protruding from the breast pocket - says, referring to several nervous protest organizers who tried to evict him when he first showed up at the rally site early this morning carrying a box of “Obama’s DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS: Murder, Drugs, Gay Sex” fliers. Since then, though, he goes on, “I have been totally surprised by the reception I have received!”

He’s not kidding. Clusters of people in Hillary shirts ask to take their photo with him, one woman covered in Clinton buttons introduces him to Greta Van Susteren, and he estimates he has handed out 500 fliers. “You could improve your credibility if you downplayed the gay sex and focused on the drugs,” sagely advises one Hillary supporter with auburn hair and elegant makeup. But in this universe, Sinclair’s credibility doesn’t seem to be suffering too much. In fact, he’s treated nearly as well as he might be at a meeting of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy. In the thirty minutes I stand with him, only one woman expresses disgust at his fliers and his willingness to chattily discourse on whether Obama is “good in bed.” (…)

It’s easy to sink into despair here. Standing and watching all these Democrats chat up Sinclair - who’s retained Montgomery Blair Sibley as his lawyer and says the Republican National Committee has also been in touch with him - makes me want to fall to my knees, rend my garments, and start insanely screaming, “Wake up! Wake up! You’ll hate a President John McCain!” But the rhetoric from the top has imparted its poison below, and the bitterest criticisms of Obama gain traction as they circulate through the virulently-pro-Hillary echo chamber. “Would you rather have a president who had an affair [Bill Clinton] or one who was a murderer [Obama]?” Jeannie, the Greensboro Democrat, asks a fellow in a floppy Tilley hat and Hillary buttons. “That’s a good point,” he replies.”

See Hilzoy’s comment:

It was ugly when some Republicans seemed to seriously believe that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster and hung crack pipes from their Christmas trees. This is ugly in exactly the same way. And if I saw a story in which Obama supporters were acting like this, I’d say that was ugly too. Politics is worth being passionate about, but it’s not worth losing your mind over.

But he sees hope:

Following instructions from Obama HQ, almost no Obama supporters have shown up to protest, amplifying the impression of the alternate Hillary universe. But around the edges, a few small signs of the other universe peek through, the one in which Barack Obama leads and most Democrats don’t suspect him of multiple felonies. Inside the Marriott’s gift shop, the sales clerk tells me that Democratic bumper stickers have been selling like crazy today. “Mostly Hillary?” I ask.

“Actually, mostly Obama,” she giggles.

Over at Daily Kos, Kagro X sees no hope:

Now, everybody knows that a substantial portion of the people who came out to vote for “uncommitted” in Michigan did so because they really wanted to vote for Obama, but he wasn’t on the ballot (which was his own doing, whatever you may think of his motivations for doing it). But the bottom line is that the consequence of that withdrawal is that the only facts that can be definitively stated about those votes is that they were for “uncommitted.” They could mean this. They could mean that. But they do mean “uncommitted.”

Or at least they did, until they were sprinkled with magic pixie dust over lunch this afternoon. Because when the RBC came back, they were magically transformed into votes that said, “Yes, we said ‘uncommitted,’ but we really meant ‘Barack Obama.’”

And maybe that was even true. The point, though, is that the RBC had no mechanism under the rules by which they are entitled to make that decision. No mechanism, that is, except one: the prerogative of the rules committee to say - provided it can muster the votes for it - that the rules can go jump in the lake.

And that’s what they did today.

But at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall knows nonsense when he sees it and offers this:

What doesn’t get mentioned, however, is this: it was widely reported and understood in both Florida and Michigan that the results of these primaries would not be counted. And based on that knowledge, large numbers of voters in both states simply didn’t participate.

If the DNC were now to turn around and decide to make these contests count after all, these non-participating voters would be disenfranchised no less than the people who did turn out would be if the DNC sticks to the rules and doesn’t seat any of the delegates. The simple fact is that large numbers of people, acting on accurate knowledge and in good faith, decided that there wasn’t a real primary being held in their state on the day in question and on that basis decided not to participate.

Now, the question is, How can we really know how many people didn’t show up because they were told it wasn’t a real election? There is of course no way to arrive at a direct answer, at least no practical one.

He recommends this post by Eric Kleefeld - careful statistical analysis - probably more than a half million voters in Michigan did not vote who otherwise would have if they had not believed that the results would not be counted. So who knows?

Also see Hunter at Daily Kos with this on Hillary as VP:

Even if you did implicitly accept the disenfranchisement (to use a familiar word, today) of the caucus states in counting up your popular vote totals, winning the popular vote plus five dollars will get you a Starbucks coffee. There isn’t even such a thing as the “popular vote” in these primaries, since some states don’t even count up those votes.

Now, maybe the Clinton camp really is seeking the VP slot (personally, I expect it’s being overhyped by the pundits more than either campaign.) More likely, she’s just seeking to use this jury-rigged “popular vote” stuff to try to sway superdelegates - but Obama is so close to having the nomination locked up anyway that it wouldn’t do much more than delay the inevitable. She needs too many; he needs a relative handful, in comparison.

If the Clinton campaign has been looking to get anything from today other than a symbolic victory, they’d be really stretching. Though this has been a lot of ill will to sow for a merely symbolic victory.

And yes - this whole post feels like I’m just stating the transparently obvious. There’s been so much “spin” and questionable “momentum” lately, though, it’s hard to judge what the heck is obvious anymore. The most infuriating thing about this whole primary process was the insulting nature of much of the campaign spin, apparently all predicated on the premise that the voters (and even superdelegates) would believe pretty much anything you could force out of your own mouth without laughing.

And elsewhere he adds this:

Yesterday, Obama needed 41 delegate votes to clinch the nomination; Clinton needed 244.

Today, Obama needs 64 votes; Clinton needs 240.5.

There are 291 delegates remaining.

So there ya go.

And there’s this account of what Chuck Todd said on MSNBC:

You know, there is a big thing we should be getting out of this party tonight, and that is the Democratic National Committee is not somehow controlled by the Clintons. Not by the Clinton campaign any more. We may have started this campaign believing that the Clinton campaign controlled, but this is Barack Obama’s party now. He’s already been winning the outside game, he now won the inside game. Yes it’s true that Harold Ickes can threaten this stuff about the credentials, but Don Fowler really did signal today by being for the Michigan compromise that, “Guys, it’s over.”

Is it? At Politico Ken Vogel notes that Bill Clinton is working up an enemies list:

With Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on the verge of defeat, Bill Clinton has been placing blame on enemies including a brazenly biased media that tried to suppress blue-collar votes, a powerful anti-war group that endorsed rival Barack Obama and weak-willed party leaders unable to stand up to either of these nefarious forces.

Pieced together from the former president’s public remarks at his wife’s campaign events and a private conversation last week with top donors to her campaign, the theory goes something like this: After Hillary recovered from a string of losses to rival Barack Obama with March 4 wins in Texas and Ohio, powerful forces conspired to pressure the superdelegates who will decide the nomination to back Obama by discouraging her supporters from voting and trying to hide evidence proving she would fare better than Obama against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.

While the former president has offered parts of this theory publicly, he fleshed it out more explicitly during a conference call last week with maxed-out donors to his wife’s campaign, a recording of which has been obtained by Politico.

And you can listen at the link. Someone is going to pay, dearly. No - times have changed. Reread Shelley’s Ozymandias - “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Yeah, right.

And anyway, at the same time as all this, Obama was taking care of other pesky issues:

Barack Obama said Saturday he has resigned his 20-year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago “with some sadness” in the aftermath of inflammatory remarks by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and more recent fiery remarks at the church by a visiting priest.

“This is not a decision I come to lightly … and it is one I make with some sadness,” Obama said at a news conference after campaign officials released a letter of resignation he sent to the church on Friday.

“I’m not denouncing the church and I’m not interested in people who want me to denounce the church,” he said, adding that the new pastor at Trinity and “the church have been suffering from the attention my campaign has focused on them.”

Obama said he and his wife have been discussing the issue since Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club in Washington last month, which reignited the furor over remarks Wright had made in various sermons at the church.

“I suspect we’ll find another church home for our family,” Obama said.

Earlier this month McCain had rejected endorsements from his two influential but controversial televangelists - the one who called the Catholic Church the Great Whore and said Hitler was God’s gift to the Jews, if you looked at things the right way, and the other who said the United States was founded back in the late eighteen century in order to wipe out Islam. Obama had his own fill of nonsense.

Perhaps Saturday, May 31, was a day to end all sorts of nonsense.

Or perhaps not:

Harold Ickes and Tina Flournoy made the following statement this evening:

Today’s results are a victory for the people of Florida who will have a voice in selecting our Party’s nominee and will see its delegates seated at our party’s convention. The decision by the Rules and Bylaws Committee honors the votes that were cast by the people of Florida and allocates the delegates accordingly.

We strongly object to the Committee’s decision to undercut its own rules in seating Michigan’s delegates without reflecting the votes of the people of Michigan.

The Committee awarded to Senator Obama not only the delegates won by Uncommitted, but four of the delegates won by Senator Clinton. This decision violates the bedrock principles of our democracy and our Party.

We reserve the right to challenge this decision before the Credentials Committee and appeal for a fair allocation of Michigan’s delegates that actually reflect the votes as they were cast.

Oh well.

Do you really get a sense of a place and what’s really going on there from a visit, with a tour guide, a visit where you can ask questions? Some people think so, and out here in Hollywood you can make good money because they think so – it’s quite a racket. There are lots of guided tours you can take – studio tours, see-the-stars’-homes tours, and you can ride the double-decker bus and listen to the driver explain everything on Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard and down on Melrose. There’s even Dearly Departed: The Tragical History Tour – see the site of the Manson murders (just up the street in Laurel Canyon) and the places where famous stars died (and you really should know that F. Scott Fitzgerald died down on this corner, at Sunset and North Laurel – a heart attack while buying cigarettes at what was once Schwab’s Drug Store and is now a small mall with a multiplex and a California Pizza Kitchen).

But Hollywood is not like that, day to day. Live here for twenty years and you know it’s just another place – you seldom see celebrities, the layers of history don’t weigh on you, and when you come across a location shoot, with all the studio trucks, cables, flats, dollies and rigging, you bitch about the traffic. Paris Hilton goes to jail? All the news helicopters overhead are a pain.

So someone says they’ve been to Hollywood and know what it’s all about? No – they don’t. No one knows – take a look – and all that doesn’t cover the everyday stuff, which is much like everyone else’s everyday stuff. And Hollywood is certainly not like this. Watching the “inside Hollywood” shows on television is pretty much like watching science fiction – that’s stuff from another planet, not earth.

The same goes for other famous places – Paris, London or Manhattan – as you have to live there and speak the language, and buy the groceries and do the wash and all the rest. If you want to know what’s really going on – to get a feel for the rhythms of the place, for what matters to the people there, for what is serious and what is just fluff and nonsense – then you do the total immersion thing. Or you turn to someone who has – for Paris you read Adam Gopnik, and of course, if you want to know what is going on in Iraq these days, you turn to Juan Cole or catch CNN’s guy there, Michael Ware.

But some disagree. John McCain disagrees:

Republican senator John McCain has accused his expected presidential rival, Barack Obama, of refusing to visit Iraq after he turned down the offer of a joint trip by the two candidates.

In an attempt to portray Mr Obama as lacking the experience for high office, Mr McCain says his Democrat rival has shied away from visits despite being a member of the Senate armed services committee.

“Senator Obama has been to Iraq once – a little over two years ago he went and he has never seized the opportunity except in a hearing to meet with General Petraeus (the US commander],” Mr McCain said, campaigning in Nevada. “My friends, this is about leadership and learning.”To ram the point home, the Republican Party website now features an online clock showing the number of days, currently 873 (including today) since Mr Obama’s last visit.

Yeah, yeah – he should drop by for a briefing or two. McCain says the two of them should go together – he’d show Obama around or something. Obama says he is planning a visit of his own, but it would be a “political stunt” to arrive together with McCain – “If I’m going to Iraq, then I’m there to talk to troops and talk to commanders, I’m not there to try to score political points.”

But McCain is all over this issue – saying Obama knows nothing and refuses to learn anything new, like how the war is a stunning success and we’re winning.

There are other issues. See Karen Tumulty in Time’s Swampland blog saying McCain’s idea for a joint trip with Obama “is one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time” – the security and logistical nightmare that would come with sending two presidential candidates into a “war zone is mind-boggling.” Still, she thinks it is a good idea for our leaders to go to Iraq “in a way that maximizes the value and minimizes the fuss and distraction.” And she thinks Obama could benefit from seeing what’s changed since his last visit in 2006 – on the idea that reports from others won’t do.

But there was that Seattle Times editorial arguing that Obama should ignore “McCain’s condescending offer” to show him around Iraq – Obama is right “that is a political stunt” that is part of the “jolly time” McCain is having “pretending he is the only candidate with enough cachet and experience to lead the US on military matters.” Obama should go to Iraq all right, but not with McCain as a “travel companion.” They say he should go as the candidate who’s right on Iraq, and on the need to see how to end the war, the one that McCain wants to continue.

But John Hinderaker in the blog Power Line says Obama being reluctant is simply “consistent with the Democrats’ irrational commitment to failure.” His point – “Obama won’t go to Iraq to size up the situation; to get our commanders’ ideas on how to bring the mission to a successful conclusion; to hear from the thousands of service members who would tell him that their mission is critically important and should not be abandoned.” You see, Obama is only interested in seeing the difficulties our troops face and how to bring them home “in defeat.”

Of course that’s the standard line – talk to any of our troops and they’ll tell you they love it there, things are going fine and we’re winning, and no American soldier would ever vote for a Democrat, and they’d be glad to do six or seven more tours. Even if all that were so, and it may not be so, the idea of letting the low-level troops on the ground make the big geopolitical decision is curious – they want to fight on so therefore that must be what they should do. But that does seem to be the idea.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary argues Obama indeed “might gain something” by going – at least he’d “silence” the Republican drumbeat seeking to “embarrass” him for not having been to Iraq in more than two years. But he’ll give McCain the “upper hand” if he lets him “shame” him into making the visit. No kidding.

See “dday” at the Washington Monthly with this – “I guess the right thinks this ‘Obama’s afraid to visit Iraq, nanny nanny poo poo; taunt is a political winner for them. It certainly fits in with their strategy to paint the Illinois senator as un-American and weak.” But McCain is saying “that you cannot show proper judgment about Iraq unless you physically set foot in the country.” As a counter he cites Michael Ware saying that McCain has been in Iraq multiple times, “and yet has screwed up assessments of the situation on the ground over and over again.”

WARE: I’ll issue a word of caution, too. I mean Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times. And we’ve seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong. So I wouldn’t be hanging my hat on the fact that your opponent has only been here once.

The idea seems to be, as “dday” says, there’s no such thing as a legitimate “fact-finding mission” in Iraq:

The trips are highly sanitized dog-and-pony shows which make it nearly impossible to get a real picture of things. So on every level, McCain “killer attack” is more like a lead balloon.

But we have two realities here. John McCain has his:

So I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it’s succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it’s long and it’s hard and it’s tough and there will be setbacks.

A few problems - Mosul isn’t quiet. and as Nico Pitney points out, McCain doesn’t seem to know how many troops we have in Iraq. Pre-surge, there were 130,000 troops in Iraq. The number of troops is supposed to be down to 140,000 by July. We end up, if we get there, with 10,000 more troops than before the surge. And this is McCain’s strength – his depth of understanding of all things military and of war as the ultimate tool for good in the world. He mixes up the Shi’a and Sunnis – who is fighting whom, and why – and now this.

John Kerry’s response:

If you don’t know the numbers of troops, it’s very difficult to make a judgment about whether or not they’re over-extended. It’s also very hard to have an understanding, as a citizen, about what levels of troops he’s going to keep there. If he thinks 150,000 is “pre-surge,” and that’s where he’s going to stay, that’s a deeply over-extended military, and it raises serious questions about his comprehension of this challenge.

The McCain campaign’s response was interesting:

Clearly John Kerry and Barack Obama have very little understanding of troop levels, but considering Barack Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in 873 days and has never had a one on one meeting with Gen. Petraeus, it isn’t a surprise to anyone that he demonstrates weak leadership.

What informed people understand, John McCain included, is that American troops are not even close to surge levels. Three of the five Army “surge” brigades have been withdrawn and additional Marines that were initially deployed for the ’surge’ have come home as well - the remaining two brigades will be home in July.

Talk about a political stunt, it’s sending out campaign surrogates to parse words about a topic Barack Obama has no experience with, and has shown zero interest in learning about.

See Hilzoy here:

Maybe, if John Kerry and Barack Obama had McCain’s deep understanding of troop levels, they would see that while 130,000 and 150,000 are different numbers in normal cases, when you’re talking about troop levels, they are the same. Somehow, I doubt it.

McCain was wrong. He should just admit it, especially since he wasn’t just off by a little. The entire surge involved about 40,000 troops. We are now about 20,000 above pre-surge levels. The problem, of course, is that he can’t admit his mistake without undercutting his line that he’s the one who really understands Iraq, despite having been consistently wrong both about the broad policy and about such minor details as who the players are.

And Hilzoy particularly likes this exchange:

McCain national security adviser Randy Scheunemann conceded that McCain said troop levels “have” been drawn down to pre-surge levels. “If he had said ‘we’d drawn down,’ he’d be accurate,” Scheunemann said. “If he had said ‘we were drawing down,’ he would be accurate.”

“To get into a debate about a verb tense rather than the real fundamental national security issues … is really a distraction.”

Hilzoy:

Sometimes it matters whether something is true now, or will become true in the future. (If you doubt this, try explaining to the IRS why the fact that you will eventually send in your tax return is all that matters.) This is one of those cases. Eventually there will be no US troops in Iraq. That does not mean that if McCain had said that there are no US troops in Iraq now, noting that that was false would be debating verb tenses.

Still, it’s nice to know in advance that we can expect John McCain not to care about the difference between past, present, and future. It will be very useful, if he becomes President, to know that he regards a statement like “I have taken action” as equivalent to “I will, eventually, get around to doing something, but I haven’t yet”, and that he takes “I have already made all the documents available” and “several decades from now, I will get around to releasing them” to be interchangeable.

Ah, McCain just had another senior moment. It’s no big deal. You knew what he meant – we’re fighting, and winning, and should continue, so don’t sweat the details, like just who were fighting and why, and what it is costing us.

MSNBC previews Obama’s response:

“There are honest differences about how to move forward in Iraq, just like there were honest differences about whether or not we should go to war,” Obama is supposed to say. “John McCain was for the invasion of Iraq; I opposed it. John McCain wants to continue George Bush’s war in Iraq indefinitely; I want to end it. So there’s going to be a clear choice for the American people this November.”

“But that’s not what John McCain’s been talking about the last few days. He’s been proposing a joint trip to Iraq that’s nothing more than a political stunt. He’s even been using it to raise a few dollars for his campaign. But it seems like Sen. McCain’s a lot more interested in my travel plans than the facts, because yesterday – in his continued effort to put the best light on a failed policy – he stood up in Wisconsin and said, ‘We have drawn down to pre-surge levels’ in Iraq.”

“That’s not true, and anyone running for commander-in-chief should know better. As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own view, but not your own facts. We’ve got around 150,000 troops in Iraq - 20,000 more than we had before the surge. We have plans to get down to around 140,000 later this summer - that’s still more troops than we had in Iraq before the surge. And today, Sen. McCain refused to correct his mistake. Just like George Bush, when he was presented with the truth, he just dug in and refused to admit his mistake. His campaign said it amounts to ‘nitpicking.’”

“Well, I don’t think tens of thousands of American troops amounts to nitpicking. Tell that to the young men and women who are serving bravely and brilliantly under our flag. Tell that to the families who have seen their loved ones fight tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.”

Yeah, but he hasn’t been there in two years. He’s relying on facts alone, and the word of those who are living through this. And if he saw where John Belushi died, from his seat on the tour bus, he’d understand Hollywood.

See Hunter at Daily Kos with this:

As the week draws towards a close, I would just like to take a quick moment to congratulate John McCain and the Republican Party for doing everything they could this week to focus the public’s attention on the Iraq War. I think they are doing wonderfully, and will no doubt win in November if they simply keep doing what they are doing. We are very frightened of this new strategy, which is very clever and working out perfectly.

Let’s run down the stories just from the last few days, shall we?

McCain used a picture of himself with a uniformed Gen. David Petraeus in a fundraising drive - a rather gauche move, and a strict no-no - and had to apologize for it.

McCain launched a very odd and desperate-sounding initiative to try to somehow goad Obama into visiting Iraq with him as a sort of campaign field trip. But McCain’s previous field trips to Iraq have badly damaged what little credibility he has on the subject, so it’s not really a good topic for him to begin with.

And so on and so forth – the list goes on. And it ends with this:

So please, Republican Party. Please keep talking about Iraq. With every waking breath, if you can manage it. Please fill the pages of our site with your assertions about the Iraq War, and your demands that the nation continue the Iraq War, and most of all your candidate’s increasingly imaginary assertions about the basic facts of the Iraq War.

I’m sure it will work out to your favor, and gain you lots and lots of votes come November. Carry on.

And it only makes this worse in Iran, as, over at the Cato Institute, Justin Logan explains:

Beyond the presidency, the more important position of Supreme Leader will change hands eventually, and probably sooner rather than later. All of these changes could bear on U.S.-Iranian relations, for better or worse. To the extent that the threat environment in Iran is viewed as high, it is more likely that Iranians will select hard-line leaders. If the temperature should be decreased, there is a greater likelihood that the worst of the Iranian leadership will find itself out of power. This is only one reason among many that U.S. leaders should calm down the rhetoric on Iran and make clear that talks - without preconditions -are an option.

But McCain wants to hold their feet to the fire, and not begin to talk with them until they give in on everything.

But what else can McCain and the Republicans run on? Josh Kahn explains the problem:

Let’s start with the economy. When voters know what party each message comes from, we loose 37% to 58% and trail among independents by 18%. Ouch. However, when you read both messages without telling voters who they come from, the story gets worse. Republican voters like the Democrat’s message more than their own party’s message by a large 14% margin when they don’t know which party it comes from. Just as disturbing, numbers among independents drop by another 10%… giving the Democrats a massive 28% advantage. Even our horrifically damaged image is better than our message on the economy. Independents and even Republicans simply like the Democrats’ plan more than ours.

Iraq and trade both follow the exact same pattern. We’re getting smashed on both issues on the partisan test, but when you look at the nonpartisan test where our damaged image isn’t a factor, the numbers get even worse among Independents and Republicans. A few Democrats (and in the case of trade a bunch of Democrats) move our way on the nonpartisan ballot, but Independents actually agree with our messages more when they know the messages came from Republicans.

On taxes, the picture gets more complex. On the partisan text, Independents like the Democrats’ message by significant 14% margin, but Republicans still like our message and give us a resounding 39% advantage. That changes drastically on the nonpartisan test.

When the party’s names are removed, Independents are almost evenly split, giving the Democrats’ message a small 5% advantage. However, Republican voters stampede away from the GOP message. Among Republicans, support for the GOP message on taxes drops by a gargantuan 53% when the party’s names are removed, leaving the Democrats with a 14% advantage. You read that right, on the nonpartisan test, Independents like the GOP message on taxes more than Republicans do and even Independents slightly favor the Democrats.

The takeaway? Our message right now is electoral poison and this isn’t all about “brand.”

So McCain has to say things like, “You didn’t serve in the military so you know nothing.” And of course, “You weren’t on the tour bus so how can you know anything?”

Do we want an enthusiastic tourist as our next president?